SPP 2378 Resilient Worlds

ResCTC: Resilience through Cross-Technology Communication

Institutions

  • TU Berlin
  • FU Berlin

Team @ TKN

Funding

  • DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)

Project Time

  • 09/2022 - 12/2025

Description

In recent years, there has been an explosive increase of broadband wireless access and proliferation of wireless Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the unlicensed radio spectrum, e.g., in the ISM/UNII bands. As a result these bands have become massively crowded by numerous wireless devices making use of diverse technologies including WiFi, LTE-U/LAA, ZigBee, 2.4 GHz LoRa, and Bluetooth. While such heterogeneous wireless networks (HetNets) have spurred the deployment of new services and applications, it comes at the cost of resilience. HetNets not only suffer from node failures and severe cross-technology interference in the shared spectrum but, due to their open nature, they are also highly prone to selective jamming. A possible way to make HetNets more resilient is cross-technology communication (CTC). CTC is an intriguing new paradigm that allows direct over-the-air communication and data exchange between seemingly incompatible wireless technologies without requiring any changes to the wireless protocols, e.g., between WiFi and ZigBee, WiFi and LoRa, ZigBee and Bluetooth, or LTE-U/LAA and WiFi. The ambition of the ResCTC project is to leverage CTC for resilient networks and critical security applications in HetNets operating in unlicensed shared radio spectrum. Based on recent prior work by both partners on CTC and wireless security, ResCTC shall address network resilience through CTC in a common joint effort and devise comprehensive solutions that are routed both in fundamental theory (information theory and signal processing) as well as practical software implementations and proof-of-concept demonstration.

Selected Publications

  1. Falko Dressler, "Physical Layer Resilience through Deep Learning in Software Radios: Technical Perspective," Communications of the ACM, vol. 65 (9), pp. 82–82, September 2022. [DOI, BibTeX, Details...]
Last modified: 2023-12-09