Survey of cross‐technology communication for IoT heterogeneous devices

The ever‐developing Internet of Things (IoT) drives the prosperity of ubiquitous connections among heterogeneous wireless devices (e.g. WiFi, ZigBee and Bluetooth) that follow different standards. Wireless devices share unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical bands, offering an opportunity for cross‐technology communication (CTC), where coexistence and cooperation mechanisms of wireless technologies incur the problem of coexistence. This study is purposed to present a rounded state‐of‐the‐art survey on CTC from the hardware perspective, CTC techniques are roughly divided into two types: hardware based and hardware free. In hardware‐based strategies, a dedicated hardware is required to send information to wireless devices for enabling direct communication. The hardware‐free schemes, by contrast, enable heterogeneous wireless devices to communicate directly by exchanging information or data without the dedicated hardware. Recent advances in CTC are reviewed in both types by expatiating on how heterogeneous wireless devices are achieving direct communication. The authors compare some CTCs with respect to throughput, communication range, energy efficiency and cost, in addition, they present open research issues of two types.