Exploiting WiFi AP for Simultaneous Data Dissemination among WiFi and ZigBee Devices

Abstract

Recent advances in Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) have opened a new door for cooperation among heterogeneous IoT devices to support ubiquitous applications, such as smart homes and smart offices. However, existing work mainly focuses on physical layer performance improvements. In this paper, we explore how to leverage the latest CTC techniques for network layer performance improvements. Specifically, we introduce Waves, which leverages WiFi to ZigBee CTC and WiFi access point’s adaptive transmit power control techniques for reliable and fast data dissemination in low-duty-cycle ZigBee networks. We extensively evaluate our design under various settings. Evaluation results show that Waves can provide reliable data dissemination and is 33.5 times faster than the state-of-the-art protocol in terms of dissemination time.