Enabling always on service discovery: Wifi neighbor awareness networking

There is untapped potential in the WiFi radios embedded in our smartphone and tablet devices. In this article we introduce the WiFi Neighbor Awareness Networking technology being standardized in the WiFi Alliance®, which leverages this potential by allowing handheld devices to continuously discover other interesting services and devices while operating in the background in an energy-efficient way. In addition, we present a thorough performance evaluation based on packet-level simulations that illustrates the performance of WiFi NAN to be expected in realistic scenarios.