(May 30) Towards Connectivity and Collaboration Among Billions of IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) is anticipated to significantly improve the qualities of our daily lives in the areas of home automation, healthcare, and transportation, among many others. This is enalbed by massive and diverse wireless devices covering every corner of our living space. This talk introduces intelligent IoT networking toward breakthroughs in critical domains including spectrum efficiency, latency, and energy economy, achieved by enabling connectivity and collaboration among billions of deployed devices via the latest technique of cross technology communication (CTC) – a new set of designs that establishes direct communication between commercial devices with incompatible wireless physical layers (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee). The transformative technology of CTC is a key enabler to achieving pervasive connectivity, and a fundamental building block to distributive exploitation of collaborative opportunities among heterogeneous and specialized networks, advancing ioT beyond the current practice of isolated operation. The talk begins with the introduction of the basic concept, the rationale, and distinct design principles of state-of-the-art CTC designs; Specifically, low-rate transparent packet-level CTC and the new high-speed physical-layer CTC, followed by their advantages and limitations. Then, explicit channel coordination strategy between Wifi and ZigBee is discussed, demonstrating a practical pathway to collaborative services via CTC. Finally, the talk concludes with future and ongoing work exploring the large design space of collaborative heterogeneous IoT networks.