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 seamless Wi-Fi 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 vonsiderable energy and time during the Wi-Fi scanning process.