Authors
Anthony J Nicholson, Yatin Chawathe, Mike Y Chen, Brian D Noble, David Wetherall
Publication date
2006/6/19
Book
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
Pages
233-245
Description
This paper presents Virgil, an automatic access point discovery and selection system. Unlike existing systems that select access points based entirely on received signal strength, Virgil scans for all available APs at a location, quickly associates to each, and runs a battery of tests to estimate the quality of each AP's connection to the Internet. Virgil also probes for blocked or redirected ports, to guide AP selection in favor of preserving application services that are currently in use. Results of our evaluation across five neighborhoods in three cities show Virgil finds a usable connection from 22% to 100% more often than selecting based on signal strength alone. By caching AP test results, Virgil both improves performance and success rate. Our overhead is acceptable and is shown to be faster than manually selecting an AP with Windows XP.
Total citations
20052006200720082009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220232024241914293422281632271910131675451
Scholar articles
AJ Nicholson, Y Chawathe, MY Chen, BD Noble… - Proceedings of the 4th international conference on …, 2006