WiPAN: A Router-Mediated Personal Area Network Protocol Enabling Bluetooth-Equivalent Discovery and Communication over 802.11 Infrastructure

<title>Abstract</title> <p>We propose WiPAN (WiFi Personal Area Network), a protocol enabling standard 802.11 infrastructure to provide Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-equivalent device discovery, pairing, and data communication without dedicated Bluetooth hardware. WiPAN introduces: (i) BLE-style advertising via vendor Information Elements (IEs) embedded in 802.11 management frames; (ii) a router-mediated relay daemon forwarding advertisements to all associated clients without requiring Wi-Fi Aware (NAN) chipset support; and (iii) WAP, a GATT-equivalent attribute protocol over standard TCP/UDP. We present a software prototype implementing all three layers and report empirical measurements from 500-trial experiments on localhost UDP sockets. The WiPAN relay daemon processes and forwards a packet in 0.171ms mean (P95: 0.378ms) — 11.7×lower than our prior simulation assumption of 2ms. WAP notification delivery latency is 0.321ms mean (P95: 0.673ms) over UDP — 93×lower than BLE 5.0’s 30ms connection-interval floor. The prototype sustains zero packet loss across 100 simultaneous advertising devices (1000 advertisements/second). Binary packet encoding reduces wire size by 68.9% versus JSON (56B vs. 180B).</p>