Harmony: Content resolution for smart devices using acoustic channel

In this paper, we utilize a novel communication framework Acoustic-WiFi to develop a smart contention resolution scheme Harmony among the contending devices to address the overhead of the traditional Wi-Fi backoff scheme (i.e. contention window countdown, DIFS) and reduce the overall collisions among the devices. Harmony uses the acoustic channel for contention resolution in Wi-Fi networks. To the best of our knowledge, Harmony is the first to leverage the acoustic interface on commodity smart devices as an addition control channel in parallel with the Wi-Fi interface. We evaluate our scheme using real testbed and simulation. Testbed experiments show more than 40% throughput gain over traditional Wi-Fi networks, while simulation results show more than 27% gain for dense networks.