Overcoming IoT Language Barriers Using Smartphone SDRs

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, smartphones are expected to frequently interact with IoT devices and even facilitate various IoT applications. Due to limited roles, energy constraints, etc., however, IoT devices may use mission-tailored or proprietary wireless protocols that smartphones do not speak natively. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the wireless "language barrier" problem between the smartphones and IoT devices of the future. We first demonstrate that smartphones have become powerful enough to process software defined radio (SDR) for some known wireless protocols. Moreover, we show that the SDRs can be packaged as "apps" and be downloaded from app stores for OS-independent deployment. Second, we show different SDR protocols on the smartphone can concurrently run through a shared RF to serve multi-tasked applications on it as might happen in diversified IoT environments. For proof-of-concept, we implement a prototype architecture that has all the SDR logic and supporting middleware on an Android smartphone which uses a USRP as the simple RF-end. Finally, we demonstrate that IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.15.4 SDRs on a smartphone, respectively, communicate with a ZigBee sensor mote, a ZigBee smart lightbulb, and a commercial Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) device, concurrently.