Nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smart phone, and 19% of Americans rely on their smartphone for either accessing valuable information or staying connected with their friends and family across the globe. Staying always-on and always-connected to the Internet is one of the most important and useful features of a smartphone.
This connection is used by almost every single application on the device including web browsers, email clients, messaging applications, etc. Unfortunately, the cellular networks on our smartphones are not perfect and do not always have cellular signal. Our devices often lose Internet connection when users are on the go and traveling.
This thesis presents a novel in-depth implementation and evaluation of what we can achieve when a user loses network connectivity. BleHttp, a library for Android, was developed that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to other devices using a different carrier within close proximity of each other and make HTTP requests. In our results, we saw 100% success rates on HTTP requests with connected devices on a good connection. Average round trip times were tested to be as low as 1.5 seconds.
Source: California Polytechnic State University
Author: Michael Wong