Managing Mobile Connectivity

[Craig Dowell <craigdo gmail com>]

Hi,

I've been contemplating how one would deal with the variety of new
wireless connection types and advertisement/discovery schemes that have
been appearing recently.

We have zillions of wireless APs scattered around the world.  Many, if
not most, smartphones allow for soft APs.  Wifi-P2P with its pre-
association service discovery is here.  HotSpot 2.0 seems primed to
become real soon and promises a new roaming experience.  DLS and TDLS
are other kinds of connections that come to mind.  There are also lots
of complications, such as lack of concurrency WRT wireless STAs.

I am wondering what would have to be done if a mobile device was brought
into an environment where there was, for example, a legacy AP or two,
HotSpot 2.0 AP, several phones running soft APs some with wireless
isolation, some without, display devices, printers, phones advertising
services over P2P, etc.  The list can go on and on.  It doesn't seem
reasonable that mere mortal users can be expected to wade through the
alphabet and logical soup that is the networking environment at, say,
this local coffee shop.

It seems to me that there is a rather large missing piece to the
wireless connectivity puzzle.  Over at "Linux Wireless" they call the
P2P part of this the "connection manager or p2p control app".  This
would integrate advertisement and discovery (mDNS) and provide a way for
the system to manage wireless "connections" with minimal user
interaction.  Hotspot 2.0 seems to begin to address part of the problem,
but only the part that solves the 3G/4G data offload problem.

Do any of you folks know of anyone that is seriously working on this
seemingly quite hard problem?

-- Craig