Zigbee based Collaborative AP Discovery

With the fast development of mobile devices and wireless technology, more and more mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces. Particularly, due to its high throughput and low cost, Wi-Fi is becoming one of the most popular interfaces. However, the high power consumption hinders its daily use in mobile devices to some extent. To tackle this problem, we present a Zigbee based Collaborative AP Discovery scheme (ZCAD) in this paper. ZCAD empowers mobile devices to share the ambient AP (Access Point) information (e.g., SSID, signal strength) via Zigbee interfaces, which enables mobile devices to directly associate with the available APs without first scanning them. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ZCAD can significantly decrease the number of scanning for AP discovery and therefore effectively reduce the power consumption of Wi-Fi communications.