A-GPS Assisted Wi-Fi Access Point Discovery on Mobile Devices for Energy Saving

TL;DR

This paper proposes an A-GPS assisted method for mobile devices to efficiently discover nearby Wi-Fi access points, reducing unnecessary scans and saving energy by leveraging location information.

Contribution

It introduces a novel A-GPS based scheme that improves Wi-Fi AP discovery efficiency and energy savings on mobile devices with multiple wireless interfaces.

Findings

Significant energy savings demonstrated in experiments.

Reduced Wi-Fi scanning frequency improves device battery life.

Effective use of location info for network discovery.

Abstract

Mobile devices have been shipped with multiple wireless network interfaces in order to meet their diverse communication and networking demands. In this paper, we propose an A-GPS assisted scheme that discovers the nearest Wi-Fi network access points (APs) by using user's location information. This allows the user to switch to the Wi-Fi interface in an intelligent manner when she/he arrives at the nearest Wi-Fi network AP. Therefore, it avoids the long periods in idle state and greatly reduces the number of unnecessary Wi-Fi scans on the mobile device. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme effectively saves energy for mobile devices integrated with Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces.