WiFly: Public WiFi Hotspots at Your Service

Locating services in public environments substantially differs from finding services in a private local network (e.g. a home network). Conventional discovery protocols require a user terminal to be connected to a network in order to query it for available services. However, out in the city, one can hardly try to connect to every public hotspot within reach to discover the services it might provide. We present WiFly, a solution that offers spontaneous access to nearby local services that can be accessed from a public WiFi hotspot. WiFly combines information encoded in a hotspot's SSID with a database of public access points to discover local services and gracefully interact with them using mobile devices. We demonstrate our approach in an interactive city game.