Performance Analysis of Smartphone-based Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspots Operating in a Congested Environment

In this work, we address the ubiquity of internet connections in smart cities by analyzing mobile Wi-Fi hotspots in terms of speed and energy efficiency in a congested Wi-Fi environment. We consider state-of-the-art consumer smartphones in our work since they are the major devices in establishing mobile Wi-Fi hotspots nowadays. There are two main wireless connections in mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, the cellular connection and the Wi-Fi connection. It has been known that the speed of Wi-Fi connections enormously supersedes the speed of cellular connections with the use of present technologies of each. In this work, we show that this well-known fact becomes controversial when establishing mobile Wi-Fi hotspots using smartphones in a nowadays typical congested Wi-Fi environment.