Impact of Cross Technology Interference on Time Synchronization and Join Time in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Zegeye Mekasha Kidane; Waltenegus Dargie

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2502.13303

Impact of Cross Technology Interference on Time Synchronization and Join Time in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Zegeye Mekasha Kidane·Waltenegus Dargie

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Low-power and low-cost wireless sensor networks enable scalable and affordable sensing and can be deployed in different environments to monitor various physical parameters. In some environments, these networks may have to coexist and interact with other systems which use the same frequency spectrum for communication. This potentially results in cross-technology interference (CTI). Dynamic channel hopping is one of the mechanisms that is currently employed to deal with CTI, but its usefulness depends on the channel selection and occupation timing. In this paper, we experimentally study the impact of CTI (caused by IEEE 802.11 networks) on time synchronization and network join time. Experiment results show that CTI can increase time drift between a child and a parent node by up to $\pm 3$ clock ticks between two synchronization intervals. Likewise, CTI affects new nodes from timely joining a network. In a simple network which does not involve multi-hop communication, the time it takes for nodes to join the network in the absence of CTI is between 40 and 70 ms (83.3\% of the time). In the presence of CTI, 96.82\% of the time, the join time is between 100 and 200 ms. In other words, the join time in the presence of CTI is about five times higher. Interestingly, not only the main spectral lobes, but also the spectral sidelobes of interfering networks impact the performance of low-power networks.

Explore related subjects

cs.NI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Zegeye Mekasha Kidane, Waltenegus Dargie. 2025-02-18. Impact of Cross Technology Interference on Time Synchronization and Join Time in Low-Power Wireless Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13303

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It

Channel State Information (CSI) has become a widely used wireless channel sensing modality for applications such as indoor localization, activity recognition, and respiration monitoring. Because collecting labeled data under every target condition is impractical, training CSI-based models often relies on simulated data produced by adding noise or perturbations to recorded channel estimates, most commonly additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This practice assumes that the receiver chain between the antenna and the channel estimator is linear and gain-invariant. We test this assumption empirically using RF jamming as a controlled perturbation on 6 commodity receivers across 2 indoor environments. The assumption does not hold. Automatic gain control compresses the channel estimate multiplicatively before digitization, producing amplitude distributions that no additive noise variance can reproduce. To close the resulting fidelity gap, we propose M_QTC, a measurement-calibrated model that learns the per-subcarrier distribution transformation through quantile mapping, temporal filtering, and copula-based cross-subcarrier reordering. M_QTC reduces amplitude error 8-fold and closes 89% of the aggregate fidelity gap across four complementary dimensions. The improvement transfers directly to downstream tasks, where 5 classifiers from different families trained on M_QTC-simulated data recover 93% of real-data jamming detection performance, while AWGN-trained classifiers remain near random decision.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

BALANCE: Hybrid Autoregressive-Speculative LLM Inference at the Network Edge

Edge inference is a promising paradigm to provide large language model (LLM) inference services in next-generation mobile networks. LLM inference mainly relies on two approaches: Autoregressive decoding (AD) generates output tokens sequentially, resulting in long latency; Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference by using a small language model (SLM) to generate multiple draft tokens for LLM verification, but incurs extra memory costs. Due to this latency-memory tradeoff, neither approach alone can efficiently serve users with heterogeneous demands under limited edge computing resources. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid autoregressive-speculative inference (BALANCE) framework for edge LLM inference. In BALANCE, an edge server hosts both an SLM and an LLM, admits users, assigns each admitted user to the AD or SD mode, and performs the two modes simultaneously. To maximize the number of served users, we formulate a task throughput maximization problem to jointly determine user admission and computing resource allocation between AD and SD under user latency requirements and server memory constraints. Since the problem is NP-hard, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that transforms the original problem into two sub-problems and obtains a sub-optimal solution with a constant approximation guarantee. Experiments demonstrate that BALANCE consistently outperforms conventional AD and SD and significantly improves task throughput.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Zero-Knowledge Remote Adversarial Attack against Wi-Fi-based Human Activity Recognition for Privacy Protection

The growing capability of Wi-Fi devices to identify human activities using channel state information (CSI) raises privacy concerns. To counter this threat, we propose GRAW, an adversary system, acting as a privacy defender, that degrades the human activity recognition (HAR) system at the user device by perturbing the router's signals that the device uses to estimate CSI. GRAW employs generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) to construct perturbation signals, and thereby eliminates the need for any information on the target HAR systems and their inputs (i.e., zero-knowledge operation). We evaluate GRAW against seven representative HAR models, using datasets collected in five environments, including our own dataset. We observe that GRAW is the only remote attack scheme that degrades every tested HAR model to a random-selection level. At the same perturbation level, GRAW achieves an attack success ratio up to 76.7% higher than comparison methods, while maintaining over 99% packet success rate on regular Wi-Fi communication. We demonstrate the feasibility of GRAW through real-time, over-the-air experiments with software-defined radios.

cs.NI↗