Rethink Phone-Wearable Collaboration From the Networking Perspective
Xing Liu, Yunsheng Yao, Feng Qian · 2017
We routinely carry wearables such as smartwatches and smart glasses with our smartphones. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of leveraging wearables' network interfaces to provide extra benefits such as enhanced network performance and better security for smartphones. To provide the protocol support for these new use cases, we propose a novel multipath scheme called Distributed Mobile Multipath (DMM), which generalizes the multipath support to multiple hosts by allowing subflows to be established from different mobile devices. To demonstrate the potential benefits of DMM, we conduct preliminary field experiments, which show that in public locations with free WiFi, leveraging the smartwatch's WiFi interface can increase the smartphone's download throughput by 70%.