Audio-WiFi: audio channel assisted WiFi network for smart phones

Abstract

Wi-Fi is becoming widely popular network interface for data communication in smart phones because of it’s high throughput, power efficiency and relatively larger range. However, the Wi-Fi network still has some perturbation such as high consumption of energy and bandwidth for detecting the contention and collision, energy consumption in idle state for continuous scanning of new networks and poor utilization of wireless channel for not detecting packet loss or collision while a transmitter is transmitting. In addition, Wi-Fi needs to transmit low rate of control packets (RTS/CTS) in order to access the channels. 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 [1], [2]. Although the solution of using bluetooth, ZigBee in parallel with WiFi 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.