BLEND: BLE Beacon-Aided Fast WiFi Handoff for Smartphones

Abstract

Recently, WiFi has become irreplaceable wireless technology to support increasing mobile applications and data traffic. While today's smartphone users frequently use WiFi on the move, smartphone does not perform WiFi handoff to nearby access points (APs) even if signal quality is severely degraded. Such undesired operation of smartphone is known as sticky client problem. In this work, we focus on resolving sticky client problem through fast WiFi handoff. First, we analyze the causes of sticky client problem based on experiments with commercial Android smartphones by focusing on WiFi scanning and handoff operations. Note that smartphones and state-of-the-art APs are equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), we propose a practical solution, called BLEND, utilizing BLE to enable fast WiFi handoff. Smartphone acquires information about nearby APs through BLE advertising packet sent by APs, and then judiciously performs WiFi handoff. We implement BLEND on Android smartphones and demonstrate that BLEND achieves up to 61% and 111% higher throughput and video bitrate, respectively, compared with a commercial Android application. We also validate that BLEND operates on smartphone with negligible energy overhead.