Personalized and seamless Wi-Fi access to Venue-Based Services

Due to the proliferation of Wi-Fi hotspots in public indoor areas (such as restaurants, airport, and shopping malls) and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi in mobile devices, Venue-Based Services are increasingly deployed by venue owners and Wi-Fi operators in their networks to improve their users´ experience and generate new revenue streams. These services are locally offered by the venue and client mobile devices should typically authenticate and associate to Wi-Fi networks to be able to discover these services. However, end-users often prefer to associate to a Wi-Fi network only if it offers the specific service they need. Moreover, they no longer want to intervene frequently to manually search for and choose a network which offers the desired service. Therefore, providing more personalization and transparency for access to Wi-Fi networks and services becomes a crucial concern and requirement to give customers the user experience they desire and expect. This paper proposes a solution to enable venue service discovery prior to Wi-Fi association while avoiding channel overhead and defines a set of service labels to uniquely and globally identify the most known venue-based services. We show then how these two contributions could be efficient and useful and help to have a personalized, transparent and automated access to venue-based services through Wi-Fi networks.