WiBWi: Encoding-based Bidirectional Physical-Layer Cross-Technology Communication between BLE and WiFi

Abstract

The booming of mobile technologies and Internet of Things (IoTs) have facilitated the explosion of wireless devices and brought convenience to people's daily lives. Coming with the explosive growth of wireless devices, incompatibility of heterogeneous wireless technologies hindered the growing demands for everything connected. And spectrum sharing among heterogeneous wireless technologies has led to severe Cross-Technology Interference (CTI), which is a vital obstacle for network reliability and spectrum utilization. Researches in recent years have shown that Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) turns out to be a promising solution with broad perspective for the coexistence of heterogeneous wireless technologies. However, due to the physical layer incompatibility of WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the researches about CTC between these two most wildly used wireless technologies are limited by now. In this paper, we propose WiBWi, a payload encoding-based bidirectional CTC scheme between BLE and WiFi, which can achieve near-optimal throughput and powerful robustness. For uplink, i.e., BLE to WiFi communication, WiBWi leverages a novel extended WiFi preamble detection rule and probabilistic inference based encode mapping to achieve fast and reliable communication. For downlink, i.e., WiFi to BLE communication, WiBWi introduces an encoding mapping scheme in the sight of BLE receiver with little modification to accomplish high throughput and robustness. Extensive evaluation shows that WiBWi can offer near-optimal throughput (near the maximum throughput of BLE) and extremely low bit error rate (less than 1%).