Sending data over WiFi management frames

Abstract

When a mobile client gets wirelessly associated with an access point, it continuously monitors its connection with the access point. To monitor the connection, the client continuously exchanges management frames with the access point. This continuous exchange of frames burns out the client's unnecessary energy. This problem is more severe in a dense WiFi network consisting of thousands of clients, for example, a large scale network of IoT devices because these unnecessary frames inject more traffic in an already congested network. In this project, we aim to solve these problems by working on two protocols { Probe Stuffing and Beacon Stuffing. Probe stuffing allows a client to wirelessly send data to the access point without ever associating with the access point and beacon stuffing allows the access point to send data to a client without having the client to associate with it. We have successfully implemented probe stuffing { end to end data ow from client to access point and ACK ow from access point to the client. We have also successfully tested this on Raspberry Pi devices and Linux PC. We have partially implemented the beacon stu ng { end to end data ow from an access point to the client.