A Hardware Implementation of BitSurfing for Communication without Packet Creation

Abstract

Recently, the BitSurfing communication paradigm was proposed, which can simplify significantly the IoT transceiver hardware, with potential for battery-less operation. BitSurfing nodes take advantage of packets broadcasted in their network and utilize them to enable intra-network communications. Every node maintains a buffer, in which it stores broadcasted packets. If a node wants to send a message, it waits until the message appears in the buffer and then it sends a low energy 1-bit pulse to inform neighbor nodes. A proof-of-concept deployment on real hardware is presented and the results of BitSurfing evaluation suggests that the proposed logic can be feasibly used for data transfer among network nodes. The study shows that BitSurfing is implementable even with very common hardware and defines an empirical model for its operation.