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Prongle: lightweight communication over unassociated wi-fi

Published: 30 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Wi-Fi capability has been a standard feature on mobile devices for over a decade. Despite Wi-Fi being practically ubiquitous, its usage has been limited to locations where the user is authorized to use a provided WLAN, e.g. home, office, or "free Wi-Fi" offered by some entity. Authenticating and associating to a previously unknown WLAN is a tedious process to go through only for the sake of e.g. receiving a push message, contributing in a public event with a smartphone, or finding out about surrounding traffic or services. There are several use cases where a lighter version of Wi-Fi could satisfy the communication need.
In this paper we present the Prongle system - a lightweight, opportunistic, association-free communication system for smart devices over conventional Wi-Fi hardware. Our system consists of a small carry-on companion device and an Android smartphone which the prongle is paired to over Bluetooth. The prongle device is effectively a message forwarding proxy dongle, hence the name Prongle. We explain the inner workings of our prongle device, present the user-interface application, and finally evaluate the system in both device-to-device range and round-trip time.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SAC '20: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
      March 2020
      2348 pages
      ISBN:9781450368667
      DOI:10.1145/3341105
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      Published: 30 March 2020

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      1. Wi-Fi
      2. opportunistic networking

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      March 30 - April 3, 2020
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