Wi-Fi: A Mechanism to Achieve Energy Efficient Discovery in Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi has enjoyed since its conception a striking success as a technology to access the Internet. Thus, Wi-Fi is today embedded in most of our portable devices like smartphones and tablets. Leveraging the ubiquity and mobility of Wi-Fi devices, in this paper we study how to expand current Wi-Fi implementations in order to design a mechanism that allows mobile devices to advertise and discover small chunks of information in an energy efficient way, even in crowded environments. We refer to this mechanism as Energy Efficient Discovery (E²D) Wi-Fi. Our contribution in this paper is twofold. First, we present the design of E²D Wi-Fi as a set of driver level extensions to current Wi-Fi implementations, which can de deployed with just a firmware upgrade, and that focus on discovery, synchronization and channel access. Second, we present a thorough performance evaluation based on packet level simulations that demonstrates the performance to be expected from E²D Wi-Fi in realistic scenarios.