On cross-technology mutualism in the internet of things : communication and localization

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) greatly expands the boundaries of the Internet at present. Numerous wireless technologies have been developed to connect everything around us to the Internet for adapting to different connection needs. However, we unilaterally pursue better performance of each technology on its own but ignore the cooperation and symbiosis between technologies for a long time. This situation has led to a growing divide and severe interference between different technologies and wasted the huge potential for cross-technology connection. This dissertation introduces a novel design paradigm for IoT networks, namely, cross-technology mutualism (CTM). CTM coordinates the heterogeneous IoT networks with minimal cost and explores the huge potential of cross-technology connection. The core idea of CTM is to build a direct communication channel among heterogeneous IoT technologies so that IoT devices can exchange information and sense each other through this channel. In this dissertation, we demonstrate four cross-technology communication and localization systems with the CTM design. First, we present TiFi, a system empowering WiFi devices to identify UHF RFIDs. Next, we present Tagcaster, which demonstrates the activation of the wireless voice for current RFID-based ETC systems. RFID, despite being a major enabler for low-power IoT, has long been used only in specific industrial scenarios due to the lack of convenient human-machine interaction interfaces. The two systems dramatically change the way we interact with RFID and make it great again. Second, beyond communication, we also demonstrate how wireless sensing benefits from CTM by creating two cross-technology sensing platforms, namely, UPS+ and iArk. Current high-precision wireless positioning systems are costly and only designed for one specific protocol. UPS+ and iArk are designed to extend the universality of wireless sensing by CTM design. UPS+ revitalizes the ultrasonic positioning systems for ultrasound-incapable smart devices. iArk is the first general-purpose deep tracking platform across protocols for the IoT, and it supports five mainstream types of IoT devices (i.e., NB-IoT, LoRa, RFID, Sigfox, and Zigbee) and is scalable to other types with minimal effort.