Coexistent Routing and Flooding Using WiFi Packets in Heterogeneous IoT Network

Routing and flooding are important functions in wireless networks. However, until now routing and flooding protocols are investigated separately within the same network (i.e., a WiFi network or a ZigBee network). Moreover, further performance improvement has been hampered by the assumption of the harmful cross technology interference. In this paper, we present coexistent routing and flooding (CRF), which leverages the unique feature of physical layer cross-technology communication technique for concurrently conducting routing within the WiFi network and flooding among ZigBee nodes using a single stream of WiFi packets. We extensively evaluate our design under different network settings and scenarios. The evaluation results show that CRF i) improves the throughput of WiFi network by 1.12 times than the state-of-the-art routing protocols; and ii) significantly reduces the flooding delay in ZigBee network (i.e., 31 times faster than the state-of-the-art flooding protocol).