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Understanding the Networking Performance of Wear OS

Published:26 March 2019Publication History
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Abstract

Networking on wearable devices such as smartwatches is becoming increasingly important as fueled by new hardware, OS support, and applications. In this paper, we conduct a first in-depth investigation of the networking performance of Wear OS, one of the most popular OSes for wearables. Through carefully designed controlled experiments conducted in a cross-device, cross-protocol, and cross-layer manner, we identify serious performance issues of Wear OS regarding key aspects that distinguish wearable networking from smartphone networking: Bluetooth (BT) performance, smartphone proxying, network interface selection, and BT-WiFi handover. We pinpoint their root causes and quantify their impacts on network performance and application QoE. We further propose practical suggestions to improve wearable networking performance.

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