A-GPS assisted Wi-Fi access point discovery on mobile devices for energy saving

Mobile devices have been shipped with multiple wireless network interfaces in order to meet their diverse communication and networking demands. In this paper, we propose an A-GPS assisted scheme that discovers the nearest Wi-Fi network access points (APs) by using user's location information. This allows the user to switch to the Wi-Fi interface in an intelligent manner when she/he arrives at the nearest Wi-Fi network AP. Therefore, it avoids the long periods in idle state and greatly reduces the number of unnecessary Wi-Fi scans on the mobile device. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme effectively saves energy for mobile devices integrated with Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces.