Mitigation of undesirable association behaviors of mobile devices with public WiFi networks

Mobile device operating systems do not allow users to specify their preferred network(s). Therefore, when there are competing WiFi networks to which a mobile device is authorized to connect, the device may associate itself unpredictably with any one of those networks. This unpredictability results in some network services being unavailable if the device connects to the “wrong” network. The device-AP association problem is a challenging one since the protocol stacks on mobile devices and their innate association behaviors are beyond a network operator's control. This paper discusses a highly memory-efficient and processor-frugal AP-side approach to altering these association behaviors. Our approach makes minor alterations to the transition sequences in the IEEE 802.11 state machine in order to impose the desired device-network association behavior. The changes that we propose are backwards compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Our experiments in the real world demonstrate that our approach is very effective and results in the desired association behavior with complete predictability, regardless of the mobile device, its iOS™ 1 or Android ™ 2 operating system, or the version of that operating system.