Enabling Heterogeneous Connectivity in Internet of Things: A Time-Reversal Approach

With the pervasive presence of massive smart devices, Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by wireless communication technology. The devices in IoT usually have very diverse bandwidth capabilities and thus in need of many communication standards. To facilitate communications between these heterogeneous bandwidths of devices, middlewares have often been developed. However, they are often not suitable for resource-constrained scenario due to their complexity. It leads us to ask is there a unified approach that can support the communication between the devices with heterogeneous bandwidths? In this paper, we propose the time-reversal (TR) approach to answer such a question. A novel TR-based heterogeneous system is proposed, which can address the bandwidth heterogeneity and maintain the benefit of TR at the same time. Although there is an increase in complexity, it concentrates mostly on the digital processing of the access point (AP), which can be easily handled with more powerful digital signal processor (DSP). Since there is no middleware in the proposed system and the additional physical layer complexity concentrates on the AP side, the proposed TR approach better satisfies the requirement of low complexity and energy efficiency for terminal devices (TDs). We further conduct the theoretical analysis of the interference in the proposed system. Simulations show the bit-error-rate (BER) performance can be significantly improved with appropriate spectrum allocation. Finally, Smart Homes is chosen as an example of IoT applications to evaluate the performance of the proposed system.