Cross-Technology Communication for the Internet of Things: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews cross-technology communication techniques in IoT, highlighting their importance for device interoperability amid heterogeneous wireless standards and summarizing existing methods and their performance trade-offs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy and comparison of CTC techniques, addressing heterogeneity challenges in IoT device communication.

Findings

Key challenge is heterogeneity of IoT devices.

Existing CTC methods are categorized into packet-level and physical-level.

Trade-offs exist among throughput, reliability, hardware modification, and concurrency.

Abstract

The ever-developing Internet of Things (IoT) brings the prosperity of wireless sensing and control applications. In many scenarios, different wireless technologies coexist in the shared frequency medium as well as the physical space. Such wireless coexistence may lead to serious cross-technology interference (CTI) problems, e.g. channel competition, signal collision, throughput degradation. Compared with traditional methods like interference avoidance, tolerance, and concurrency mechanism, direct and timely information exchange among heterogeneous devices is therefore a fundamental requirement to ensure the usability, inter-operability, and reliability of the IoT. Under this circumstance, Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) technique thus becomes a hot topic in both academic and industrial fields, which aims at directly exchanging data among heterogeneous devices that follow different standards. This paper comprehensively summarizes the CTC techniques and reveals that the key challenge for CTC lies in the heterogeneity of IoT devices, including the incompatibility of technical standards and the asymmetry of connection capability. Based on the above finding, we present a taxonomy of the existing CTC works (packet-level CTCs and physical-level CTCs) and compare the existing CTC techniques in terms of throughput, reliability, hardware modification, and concurrency.