BusyBee: Low Rate WiFi-ZigBee Communications without Gateways

Abstract

Nowadays, the overcrowding of ISM bands is becoming an evident limitation for the performance and widespread us- age of 802.11 and 802.15.4 technologies. In this demo, we prove that it is possible to opportunistically exploit the inter- technology interference between 802.11 and 802.15.4 to build an unconventional low-rate communication channel and sig- nalling protocol, devised to improve the performance of each contending technology. Differently from previous solutions, inter-technology communications do not require the deployment of a gateway with two network interfaces, but can be activated (when needed) directly between two heterogeneous nodes, e.g. a WiFi node and a ZigBee node. This capability can be very useful for coordinating channel access between WiFi and ZigBee networks, reading measurements from ZigBee sensors, or configuring ZigBee actuators (e.g. an on/off power switch) directly by using common smartphones or laptops which are only equipped with WiFi interfaces.