Today's WiFi networks deliver a large fraction of traffic. However, the
performance and quality of WiFi networks are still far from satisfactory. Among
many popular quality metrics (throughput, latency), the probability of
successfully connecting to WiFi APs and the time cost of the WiFi connection
set-up process are the two of the most critical metrics that affect WiFi users'
experience. To understand the WiFi connection set-up process in real-world
settings, we carry out measurement studies on 5 million mobile users from 4
representative cities associating with 7 million APs in 0.4 billion WiFi
sessions, collected from a mobile "WiFi Manager" App that tops the Android/iOS
App market. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to do such large
scale study on: how large the WiFi connection set-up time cost is, what factors
affect the WiFi connection set-up process, and what can be done to reduce the
WiFi connection set-up time cost. Based on the measurement analysis, we develop
a machine learning based AP selection strategy that can significantly improve
WiFi connection set-up performance, against the conventional strategy purely
based on signal strength, by reducing the connection set-up failures from
33% to 3.6% and reducing 80% time costs of the connection set-up
processes by more than 10 times.Comment: 11pages, conferenc