Personalized and seamless Wi-Fi access to Venue-Based Services

Due to the proliferation of Wi-Fi hotspots in public indoor areas (such as restaurants, airport, and shopping malls) and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi in mobile devices, Venue-Based Services are increasingly deployed by venue owners and Wi-Fi operators in their networks to improve their users' experience and generate new revenue streams. These services are locally offered by the venue and client mobile devices should typically authenticate and associate to Wi-Fi networks to be able to discover these services. However, end-users often prefer to associate to a Wi-Fi network only if it offers the specific service they need. Moreover, they no longer want to intervene frequently to manually search for and choose a network which offers the desired service. Therefore, providing more personalization and transparency for access to Wi-Fi networks and services becomes a crucial concern and requirement to give customers the user experience they desire and expect. This paper proposes a solution to enable venue service discovery prior to Wi-Fi association while avoiding channel overhead and defines a set of service labels to uniquely and globally identify the most known venue-based services. We show then how these two contributions could be efficient and useful and help to have a personalized, transparent and automated access to venue-based services through Wi-Fi networks.