skip to main content
research-article

Link Quality Estimation of Cross-Technology Communication: The Case with Physical-Level Emulation

Published: 05 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Research on cross-technology communication (CTC) has made rapid progress in recent years. While the CTC links are complex and dynamic, how to estimate the quality of a CTC link remains an open and challenging problem. Through our observation and study, we find that none of the existing approaches can be applied to estimate the link quality of CTC. Built upon the physical-level emulation, transmission over a CTC link is jointly affected by two factors: the emulation error and the channel distortion. Furthermore, the channel distortion can be modeled and observed through the signal strength and the noise strength. We, in this article, propose a new link metric called C-LQI and a joint link model that simultaneously takes into account the emulation error and the channel distortion in the In-phase and Quadrature (IQ) domain. We accurately describe the superimposed impact on the received signal. We further design a lightweight link estimation approach including two different methods to estimate C-LQI and in turn the packet reception rate (PRR) over the CTC link. We implement C-LQI and compare it with two representative link estimation approaches. The results demonstrate that C-LQI reduces the relative estimation error by 49.8% and 51.5% compared with s-PRR and EWMA, respectively.

References

[1]
ATMEL. 2020. AT86RF230 Provided by ATMEL. https://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/313502/ATMEL/AT86RF230.html.
[2]
Nouha Baccour, Anis Koubâa, Luca Mottola, Marco Antonio Zúñiga, Habib Youssef, Carlo Alberto Boano, and Mário Alves. 2012. Radio link quality estimation in wireless sensor networks: A survey. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN) 8, 4 (2012), 1–33.
[3]
Bastian Bloessl. 2020. An IEEE802.15.4 OQPSK Transceiver for GNU Radio, Based on Thomas Schmid’s Implementation. https://github.com/bastibl/gr-ieee802-15-4.
[4]
Carlo Alberto Boano, Thiemo Voigt, Adam Dunkels, Fredrik Österlind, Nicolas Tsiftes, Luca Mottola, and Pablo Suarez. 2009. Poster abstract: Exploiting the LQI variance for rapid channel quality assessment. In Proceedings of ACM/IEEE IPSN.
[5]
Kameswari Chebrolu and Ashutosh Dhekne. 2009. Esense: Communication through energy sensing. In Proceedings of ACM MobiCom.
[6]
Yongrui Chen, Zhijun Li, and Tian He. 2018. TwinBee: Reliable physical-layer cross-technology communication with symbol-level coding. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[7]
Zicheng Chi, Zhichuan Huang, Yao Yao, Tiantian Xie, Hongyu Sun, and Ting Zhu. 2017. EMF: Embedding multiple flows of information in existing traffic for concurrent communication among heterogeneous IoT devices. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[8]
Zicheng Chi, Yan Li, Zhichuan Huang, Hongyu Sun, and Ting Zhu. 2019. Simultaneous bi-directional communications and data forwarding using a single ZigBee data stream. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[9]
Zicheng Chi, Yan Li, Hongyu Sun, Yao Yao, Zheng Lu, and Ting Zhu. 2016. B2W2: N-Way concurrent communication for IoT devices. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys.
[10]
Zicheng Chi, Yan Li, Yao Yao, and Ting Zhu. 2017. PMC: Parallel multi-protocol communication to heterogeneous IoT radios within a single WiFi channel. In Proceedings of IEEE ICNP.
[11]
Douglas S. J. De Couto, Daniel Aguayo, John C. Bicket, and Robert Tappan Morris. 2003. A high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing. In Proceedings of ACM MobiCom.
[12]
Rodrigo Fonseca, Omprakash Gnawali, Kyle Jamieson, and Philip Levis. 2007. Four-bit wireless link estimation. In Proceedings of ACM HotNets.
[13]
FREESCALE. 2020. MC1321 Provided By FREESCALE. https://www.datasheetarchive.com/MC1321-datasheet.html.
[14]
Xiuzhen Guo, Yuan He, Jia Zhang, and Haotian Jiang. 2019. WIDE: Physical-level CTC via digital emulation. In Proceedings of IEEE IPSN.
[15]
Xiuzhen Guo, Yuan He, Xiaolong Zheng, Liangcheng Yu, and Omprakash Gnawali. 2018. Zigfi: Harnessing channel state information for cross-technology communication. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[16]
Xiuzhen Guo, Yuan He, Xiaolong Zheng, Zihao Yu, and Yunhao Liu. 2019. LEGO-Fi: Transmitter-transparent CTC with cross-demapping. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[17]
Xiuzhen Guo, Xiaolong Zheng, and Yuan He. 2017. Wizig: Cross-technology energy communication over a noisy channel. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[18]
Wenchao Jiang, Song Min Kim, Zhijun Li, and Tian He. 2018. Achieving receiver-side cross-technology communication with cross-decoding. In Proceedings of ACM MobiCom.
[19]
Wenchao Jiang, Zhimeng Yin, Song Min Kim, and Tian He. 2017. Transparent cross-technology communication over data traffic. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[20]
Wenchao Jiang, Zhimeng Yin, Ruofeng Liu, Zhijun Li, Song Min Kim, and Tian He. 2017. BlueBee: A 10,000 faster cross-technology communication via PHY emulation. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys.
[21]
Bryce Kellogg, Vamsi Talla, Shyamnath Gollakota, and Joshua R. Smith. 2016. Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing low power to Wi-Fi transmissions. In Proceedings of USENIX NSDI.
[22]
Song Min Kim and Tian He. 2015. FreeBee: Cross-technology communication via free side-channel. In Proceedings of ACM MobiCom.
[23]
Song Min Kim, Shuai Wang, and Tian He. 2015. cETX: Incorporating spatiotemporal correlation for better wireless networking. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys.
[24]
Yan Li, Zicheng Chi, Xin Liu, and Ting Zhu. 2018. Chiron: Concurrent high throughput communication for IoT devices. In Proceedings of ACM MobiSys.
[25]
Yan Li, Zicheng Chi, Xin Liu, and Ting Zhu. 2018. Passive-ZigBee: Enabling ZigBee communication in IoT networks with 1000+ less power consumption. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys.
[26]
Zhijun Li and Tian He. 2017. WEBee: Physical-layer cross-technology communication via emulation. In Proceedings of ACM MobiCom.
[27]
Zhijun Li and Tian He. 2018. LongBee: Enabling long-range cross-technology communication. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[28]
Nordic. 2020. nRF24E1/nRF9E5 Provided By Nordic. https://www.keil.com/dd/docs/datashts/nordic/nrf24e1.pdf.
[29]
Daniele Puccinelli and Martin Haenggi. 2008. DUCHY: Double cost field hybrid link estimation for low-power wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of Hot EmNets.
[30]
Kannan Srinivasan, Prabal Dutta, Arsalan Tavakoli, and Philip Levis. 2006. Understanding the causes of packet delivery success and failure in dense wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys.
[31]
TI. 2020. CC2530 Provided By TI. https://www.ti.com.cn/product/cn/CC2530.
[32]
Shuai Wang, Zhimeng Yin, Zhijun Li, and Tian He. 2018. Networking support for physical-layer cross-technology communication. In Proceedings of IEEE ICNP.
[33]
Wei Wang, Xin Liu, Yao Yao, Yan Pan, Zicheng Chi, and Ting Zhu. 2019. CRF: Coexistent routing and flooding using WiFi packets in heterogeneous IoT networks. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[34]
Wei Wang, Tiantian Xie, Xin Liu, Yao Yao, and Ting Zhu. 2018. ECT: Exploiting cross-technology transmission for reducing packet delivery delay in IoT networks. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[35]
Alec Woo, Terence Tong, and David E. Culler. 2003. Taming the underlying challenges of reliable multihop routing in sensor networks. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys.
[36]
Zhimeng Yin, Wenchao Jiang, Song Min Kim, and Tian He. 2017. C-Morse: Cross-technology communication with transparent Morse coding. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[37]
Zhimeng Yin, Zhijun Li, Song Min Kim, and Tian He. 2018. Explicit channel coordination via cross-technology communication. In Proceedings of ACM MobiSys.
[38]
Zihao Yu, Chengkun Jiang, Yuan He, Xiaolong Zheng, and Xiuzhen Guo. 2018. Crocs: Cross-technology clock synchronization for WiFi and ZigBee. In Proceedings of ACM EWSN.
[39]
Jia Zhang, Xiuzhen Guo, Haotian Jiang, Xiaolong Zheng, and Yuan He. 2020. Link quality estimation of cross-technology communication. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM.
[40]
Marco Zuniga and Bhaskar Krishnamachari. 2007. An analysis of unreliability and asymmetry in low-power wireless links. ACM TOSN 3, 2 (2007).

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 18, Issue 1
February 2022
434 pages
ISSN:1550-4859
EISSN:1550-4867
DOI:10.1145/3484935
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Journal Family

Publication History

Published: 05 October 2021
Accepted: 01 August 2021
Revised: 01 June 2021
Received: 01 October 2020
Published in TOSN Volume 18, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Cross-technology
  2. link quality estimation

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • National Key R&D Program of China
  • R&D Project of Key Core Technology and Generic Technology in Shanxi Province
  • Smart Xingfu Lindai Project

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)9
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 23 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media