Wireless Quantization Index Modulation: Enabling Communication Through Existing Signals

TL;DR

This paper introduces Wireless Quantization Index Modulation (QIM), a novel method to embed data into existing radio signals like TV and radio broadcasts, enabling communication with IoT devices without spectrum overhead or significant signal impact.

Contribution

The paper presents a new wireless QIM technique that leverages existing signals for data embedding, avoiding additional spectrum use and infrastructure costs.

Findings

Embedded data rates of 8-200 kbps across different signals.

Negligible impact on original signal quality.

Effective communication with IoT devices using existing signals.

Abstract

As the number of IoT devices continue to exponentially increase and saturate the wireless spectrum, there is a dire need for additional spectrum to support large networks of wireless devices. Over the past years, many promising solutions have been proposed but they all suffer from the drawback of new infrastructure costs, setup and maintenance, or are difficult to implement due to FCC regulations. In this paper, we propose a novel Wireless Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) technique which uses existing infrastructure to embed information into existing wireless signals to communicate with IoT devices with negligible impact on the original signal and zero spectrum overhead. We explore the design space for wireless QIM and evaluate the performance of embedding information in TV, FM and AM radio broadcast signals under different conditions. We demonstrate that we can embed messages at up to 8-200~kbps with negligible impact on the audio and video quality of the original FM, AM and TV signals respectively.