Demo: Cross-Technology Broadcast Communication between Off-The-Shelf Wi-Fi, BLE, and IEEE 802.15.4 Devices

In this demo, we showcase a generic cross-technologycommunication scheme allowing bidirectional communication between off-the-shelf IoT devices operating in the 2.4 GHz band. In particular, we make use of and extend the X-Burst framework to enable communication between devices embedding a Wi-Fi, BLE, or IEEE 802.15.4 radio. X-Burst encodes data in the duration of energy bursts by transmitting legitimate frames with different payload length. Devices with incompatible physical layer, but operating on overlapping channels, can detect the energy bursts and decode information by sampling the received signal strength at a high frequency. As the transmission of frames with variable size and energy detection are features available in most off-the-shelf IoT devices, X-Burst is not technology-specific and allows to broadcast cross-technology frames to multiple devices using diverse technologies simultaneously.