Enabling Seamless Communication and RF Sensing among IoT Devices

Abstract

The exponentially increasing number of internet of things (IoT) devices and the data generated by these devices introduce the spectrum crisis at the already crowded ISM 2.4 GHz band. On one hand, there is no efficient solution to coordinate a large amount of heterogeneous IoT devices that have different communication technologies (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth). On the other hand, the crowded wireless traffic potentially introduces opportunities for conducting radio frequency (RF) sensing using pervasively available signals generated by heterogeneous IoT devices. To address these issues, we propose a multi-layer heterogeneous networking system to enable seamless communication and RF sensing among IoT devices. This networking system i) connects IoT devices with different communication protocols by utilizing their unique physical-layer or link-layer features on overlapped frequency band (e.g., ISM 2.4 GHz band); and ii) utilizes the heterogeneous wireless traffic for non-intrusive human activity recognition and monitoring, which provides data support for the emerging smart health and smart home applications. This system aims to significantly increase the throughput and spectrum utilization for wireless communication while keeping the low cost (in terms of energy and deployment) of IoT networks. Furthermore, the system provides sensing capability by using existing RF signals in the air.