Acoustic-WiFi: Acoustic Support for Wi-Fi Networks in Smart Devices

In this paper, we propose a novel communication framework, Acoustic-WiFi, that utilizes the acoustic channel (i.e., microphone/speaker) as a control channel to develop more efficient Wi-Fi networks. We used the Acoustic-WiFi framework to develop a Power Saving Mode (PSM) scheme; A2PSM, and a smart contention resolution scheme; Harmony. In A2PSM, we propose an acoustic channel assisted power saving scheme for the Wi-Fi interface, which addresses the inefficiency of the existing power saving schemes in smart devices. In this scheme, we leverage the low power consumption of the acoustic interfaces to reduce the wakeup events of the Wi-Fi interface when it is in power saving mode. We develop a small-scale prototype testbed on real smartphones to evaluate the proposed A2PSM scheme. Experiments show that A2PSM could save up to more than 25% more power than the existing schemes. In Harmony, we address the overhead of the Wi-Fi backoff scheme (i.e., contention window countdown, DIFS) and reduce the overall collisions among the devices. Harmony uses the acoustic channel for contention resolution in Wi-Fi networks. We also evaluate Harmony using real testbed and simulation. Experiments using the testbed show a 40% gain in throughput over the 802.11 Wi-Fi backoff scheme, while simulation results show a gain of more than 27% for dense networks.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a novel communication framework called Acoustic-WiFi that utilizes the acoustic channel to develop more efficient Wi-Fi networks. The framework includes a power saving scheme and a contention resolution scheme. Experimental results show significant power saving and throughput improvement.