HotMobile 2012 Poster: Audio-WiFi: Audio Channel Assisted WiFi Network for Smart Phones

Wi-Fi is becoming widely popular network interface for data communication in smart phones because of its high throughput, power efficiency and relatively large range. However, the Wi-Fi network still several inefficiencies in terms of high energy consumption, unfairness between co-located nodes, and bandwidth poor utilization. For example, Wi-Fi transmitter has to transmit the full packet even if the receiver could flags the packet as corrupted one at early stage of the transmission. Another example, Wi-Fi transmits control packets (RTS/CTS/ACK) low rate. Researchers have proposed to use other existing wireless network interface (Bluetooth , ZigBee etc.) as a parallel communication for enhancing the performance of Wi-Fi network by addressing above issues. Although the solution of using bluetooth and ZigBee in parallel withWiFi improves the performance, it creates severe interference with Wi-Fi for communicating in the same frequency band (2.4GHz). In our project, we like to enhance the performance of data communication over the Wi-Fi network by integrating the mic/speaker of the smart phones as a parallel communication channel. Our idea is to propose a novel framework of communication using mic/speaker in order to develop a more efficient Wi-Fi network communication. The non-interferential nature with Wi-Fi network is the biggest advantage of using audio communication channel for this purpose. For audio communication we like to exploit frequency band beyond normal human ear perception. At our knowledge, most of the smart phones are both capable of generating and discerning audio frequency beyond human ear perception.