Pervasive content-centric wireless networking

Current communication approaches assume network associations as a prerequisite to both content discovery and access. This network-centric paradigm incurs substantial communication and time overhead, as devices build knowledge of content availability only after blindly associating to a network. In pervasive mobile networking, this prerequisite and associated overhead prevents devices to efficiently identify desired communication partners, i.e., devices running an application or providing content of interest, within the broad mass of devices in communication range as found in everyday scenarios. SO-Fi, instead, realizes content-centric wireless networking by enabling pervasive content discovery before establishing a network infrastructure. SO-Fi builds on the IEEE 802.11 wireless broadcast medium to instantly achieve a discovery scope covering all devices in communication range. Realizing content discovery outside of secure network associations, SO-Fi supports use-case-specific communication security, i.e., confidentiality, WPA2 network security, DoS robustness, and user authentication. We show SO-Fi's feasibility and performance through real-world experimentation. Indeed, SO-Fi makes instant, content-centric wireless networking readily accessible to application designers.