PRComm: Anti-Interference Cross-Technology Communication Based on Pseudo-random Sequence

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), we have seen a larger number of devices deployed with different wireless communication protocols (i.e., WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth). Working in the same place opens a new opportunity for these devices to communicate directly with each other, leveraging on Cross-technology Communication (CTC). However, since these devices operate in the same frequency band which results in the competition against each other for network resources, severe interfere may arise. In this paper, we explore pseudo-random sequence (PR sequence) to design a novel CTC protocol that enables low-cost direct communication between WiFi and ZigBee in noisy indoor environments. Pseudorandom sequence offers a unique statistical feature to accomplish both information transmission and synchronization between heterogeneous devices. We design a dynamic synchronous decoding strategy to handle interference coexisted among different wireless protocols. Our system does not require any modification of communication protocol and underlying hardware and firmware. We implement our system on commercial devices (Intel 5300 WiFi NIC and MicaZ CC2420), and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the system performance in three typical scenarios. The experimental results show that the synchronization time of our approach is lower than 0.5 ms, and the accuracy is greater than 84% while the channel occupancy is as high as 50%.