PatternBee: Enabling ZigBee-to-BLE Direct Communication by Offset Resistant Patterns

In Internet of Things (IoT), ZigBee and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are two popular technologies. Their devices often coexist and enabling them to communicate with each other will facilitate our daily lives greatly. In this article, we present PatternBee, a lightweight physical-level cross-technology communication (PHY-level CTC) scheme which enables ZigBee-to-BLE direct communications. In PatternBee, the BLE receiver divides received ZigBee symbols into pieces. We find that some pieces always have a phase shift of 0 no matter how large the sampling offset is. We call these pieces offset resist pieces (ORPs). By identifying the occurrence pattern of these ORPs, we propose a Pattern-based decoding algorithm. With this algorithm, the BLE receiver can decode ZigBee symbols at very low processing complexity, while achieving very high decoding accuracy. Real-world experiments verify the effectiveness and accuracy of PatternBee.