Increasing WiFi scan rate

Asked 2012-03-02T12:42:40.200

I've got a problem. I'm developing an android application that scans for wireless accesspoints/routers. I've been testing a couple of devices and I'm getting scan rates of 2, 1, 0.5, 0.1 etc. scans per second.

My goal is to reach 10 scans per second because a router can send beacons 10 times a second. And we need this for our application.

Is there away to make this possible? Perhapse hack a rom and replace the wifi drivers? I've been looking in to this but I can't find anything about this frequentie inside the driver.

The driver used is BCM4329 driver, I can't find any datasheets of the BCM4329 so it's kinda hard to figure this out.

Thanks in advance. flitjes

Edit Report

2 Answers

You don't need to change anything in the device driver, Android makes it available to you to scan for access points. See the documentation.

Although requesting that many scans will probably not be very good for the battery life and the responsiveness of your app...

answered 2012-03-30T00:24:23.117

Your assumption that beacon rate is 10 per second is incorrect. This is really an AP configuration parameter, although 10 per sec is default in most. Besides that, APs do not send beacons simultaneously, if this happens, it's called a collision and a back-off algorithm is used for retransmission. In addition, even scanning 10 times per second doesn't make it certain for you to capture all beacons, like was pointed out in the previous answers.

answered 2012-10-23T12:37:33.887

Increasing WiFi scan rate

2 Answers

Your Answer