SplitScan: Sharing Wi-Fi Scan Information through Bluetooth Low Energy

Abstract

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are the most widely used wireless technologies because they use unlicensed spectrum and are widely deployed on the latest mobile devices. For seamlessWiFi connectivity in mobile environments, the mobile device should maintain the information of adjacent access points (APs) through the scanning procedure, which often consumes a significant amount of energy and time. In this paper, we develop SplitScan that enables mobile devices to share Wi-Fi scanning information with adjacent stations (STAs) via Bluetooth packet exchange. We evaluate its performance through experiment with a testbed implementation as well as extensive simulation. The results show that SplitScan saves considerable energy and time during the Wi-Fi scanning process.