X-Burst: Enabling Multi-Platform Cross-Technology Communication between Constrained IoT Devices

Cross-technology communication (CTC) allows devices employing incompatible wireless technologies to directly exchange information without the need of expensive gateways. Existing work on CTC has showcased the ability of exchanging data between diverse wireless standards, but has not analysed the challenges nor tackled the problem of enabling CTC between multiple constrained IoT platforms with different characteristics. Indeed, CTC schemes are often hacked on very specific hardware platforms, which results in a lack of a general, portable solution. Furthermore, CTC has always been tested as a standalone piece of functionality, and its seamless integration with the classical operations of a constrained IoT device remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present X-Burst, a portable framework that allows multiple constrained IoT platforms with diverse characteristics to seamlessly interact using CTC. X-Burst allows to customize the CTC working principle (e.g., how information is encoded, or the alphabet used to encode a symbol) and enables the combination of different encoding and decoding strategies independently of the employed hardware platform. Thanks to its high modularity, X-Burst also simplifies the development of alternative CTC implementations and makes it easy to compare different approaches. As a proof of concept, we integrate X-Burst into the Contiki operating system without changing Contiki's core functions and allow an IoT device to seamlessly support CTC in parallel to its normal operations. We then showcase the functionality of X-Burst by enabling a bidirectional CTC between off-the-shelf heterogeneous IoT platforms based on IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). An experimental evaluation further shows X-Burst's small memory footprint and analyses the robustness and throughput of different encoding schemes.