Physical-Level Parallel Inclusive Communication for Heterogeneous IoT Devices

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed the way people interact with the world. Various kinds of wireless protocols have been developed to support diverse types of IoT communications. Unfortunately, the lack of spectrum resources puts a hard limit on managing the large-scale heterogeneous IoT system. Although previous works alleviate this strain by coordinating transmission power, time slots, and sub-channels, they may not be feasible in future IoT applications with dense deployments. In this paper, we explore a physical-level parallel inclusive communication paradigm for the coexistence of Wi-Fi and ZigBee, which leverages novel bits embedding approaches on the OQPSK protocol to enable both Wi-Fi and ZigBee IoT devices to decode the same inclusive signals at the same time but with each one’s different data. By carefully crafting the inclusive signals using legacy Wi-Fi protocol, the overlapping spectrum can be simultaneously re-used by both protocols, expecting a maximum data rate (250kbps) for ZigBee devices and up to 3.75Mbps for a Wi-Fi pair over only a 2MHz bandwidth. The achieved spectrum efficiency outperforms a majority of CTC schemes and parallel communication designs. Compared with existing works on parallel communication, our proposed system is the first one that achieves an entire software-level design, which can be readily implemented on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices without any hardware modification. Based on extensive real-world experiments on both USRP and COTS device platforms, we demonstrate the feasibility, generality, and efficiency of the proposed new paradigm.