How wireless technologies are able communicate directly with each other

Researchers at TU Graz's Institute of Technical Informatics have now developed a system that enables direct information exchange between commercially available devices that use different radio technologies but the same radio frequencies. This is a generic framework called X-Burst, which companies will be able to integrate into the operating systems of their IoT products in the future. The researchers make use of time-controlled energy pulses ("energy bursts") in the radio channel, which can be generated by any smart device and detected by most of them: "We send standard-compliant data packets of varying lengths. These packets are encoded in their length, i.e. the information is stored in the duration of the packets. The receivers monitor the energy level in the radio channel and can thus detect the packets, determine their duration and finally extract the information contained in them," explain Rainer Hofmann and Hannah Brunner, who were in charge of the project together with colleague Carlo Alberto Boano.

In their work, the researchers concentrated primarily on data exchange in the license-free 2.4 GHz band. This frequency range is used by many radio standards—including the most common technologies Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (low energy) and ZigBee, which were the focus of the investigations. Using a prototype, the team was able to demonstrate that X-Burst enables successful communication between different wireless technologies without the need for expensive and inflexible gateways, as are currently required for devices with different wireless technologies.

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-03-cross-technology-internet-significantly.html