Global Cooperation for Heterogeneous Networks

Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band has become more and more crowded due to the ever-growing size of many mainstream technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Bluetooth. Though they compete for limited spectrum resources leading to severe Cross Technology Interference (CTI), it also provides great opportunities to better utilize the scarce bandwidth resources. A fundamental question is how to ensure harmonious and effective operations for these networks? To exploit this issue, a novel global cooperation framework is proposed. In particular, our work enables direct and simultaneous Cross Technology Communication (CTC) from a single Wi-Fi to ZigBee, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi commodity devices sharing the same band. Compared to existing CTC approaches, our scheme improves the communication efficiency significantly, and hence is the foundation for effective global cooperation. Based on the proposed CTC scheme, a unified Media Access Control (MAC) approach is introduced to cooperate CTC message transmission and reception for heterogeneous devices with different MACs. Two proof-of-concepts applications, e.g. global synchronization and global CTI coordination are discussed to fully leverage the benefits of global cooperation. Extensive evaluations show that compared with existing schemes, the proposed framework achieves 13 times lower synchronization error and 9 times lower average packet delay in CTI intensive environments.