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Characterizing WiFi connection and its impact on mobile users: practical insights

Published:30 September 2013Publication History

ABSTRACT

Smartphones and WiFi networks are becoming pervasive. As a result, new applications and services are being offered to smartphone users through WiFi networks. Some of the more novel applications provide data services to pedestrians as they move through WiFi coverage areas in public loca- tions such as railway stations. One significant factor that will influence the data transfers for users when they are on the move, is the connection set-up time. In this paper we characterize the WiFi connection set-up process. Using data from voluntary Android smartphone users, we show that WiFi connection setup have significant delays, sometimes as high as 10s. Then through a detailed analysis of the con- nection set-up process we show that, contrary to previous findings, this is due to losses of DHCP messages at the WiFi access point. We also show that some of the methods that have been adopted by device manufactures are suboptimal and this can be addressed at the WiFi access point. Finally using this insight we extend a known mathematical model, which will help in the dimensioning of WiFi networks for pedestrian smartphone users.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        WiNTECH '13: Proceedings of the 8th ACM international workshop on Wireless network testbeds, experimental evaluation & characterization
        September 2013
        114 pages
        ISBN:9781450323642
        DOI:10.1145/2505469

        Copyright © 2013 ACM

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 30 September 2013

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        WiNTECH '13 Paper Acceptance Rate11of26submissions,42%Overall Acceptance Rate63of100submissions,63%

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