EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking

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Research Article
Open Access

Beacon-Based Service Publishing Framework in Multiservice Wi-Fi Hotspots

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking20072007:038463

https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/38463

©  Dario Di Sorte et al. 2007

Received: 7 November 2006

Accepted: 8 March 2007

Published: 24 May 2007

Abstract

In an expected future multiaccess and multiservice IEEE 802.11 environment, the problem of providing users with useful service-related information to support a correct rapid network selection is expected to become a very important issue. A feasible short-term 802.11-tailored working solution, compliant with existing equipment, is to publish service information encoded within the SSID information element within beacon frames. This makes it possible for an operator to implement service publishing in 802.11 networks while waiting for a standardized mechanism. Also, this straightforward approach has allowed us to evaluate experimentally the performance of a beacon-based service publishing solution. In fact, the main focus of the paper is indeed to present a quantitative comparison of service discovery times between the legacy scenario, where the user is forced to associate and authenticate with a network point of access to check its service offer, and the enhanced scenario where the set of service-related information is broadcasted within beacons. These discovery times are obtained by processing the results of a measurement campaign performed in a multiaccess/service 802.11 environment. This analysis confirms the effectiveness of the beacon-based approach. We also show that the cost in terms of wireless bandwidth consumption of such solution is low.

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Authors’ Affiliations

(1)
Department of Electronic and Information Engineering (D.I.E.I.), University of Perugia

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Copyright

© Dario Di Sorte et al. 2007

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.