Wi-Fi neighborcast: enabling communication among nearby clients

Abstract

Several applications require physically nearby Wi-Fi clients to communicate with each other. In this paper, we present a new group communication paradigm, called Neighborcast, that forms a multicast group among all nearby clients, even when they are on different frequency channels or associated to different Access Points. We describe three ways in which neighborcast can be implemented, and present three applications that will benefit from this new group communication paradigm.