It's supposed to be seamless. So much mobile technology is premised on the idea that moving between networks—cellular to Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi, cellular to cellular—is a more or less invisible process. We, as consumers, are then free to interact with the cloud as intended—as an extension of mobile devices that's all but necessary for them to operate at all. The whole cloud idea becomes compromised when our devices start fumbling network connections. Which happens kind of a lot.

You surely know the feeling of waiting for a connection. You've picked a Wi-Fi access point to connect to, but your device is just hanging there in limbo. It's frustrating for the reason above—not being connected means not having access to most of the functionality of your device. Most of your apps rely on some cloud functionality; your music and video is streamed from the cloud; GPS relies on downloading maps from the cloud. So, why does it sometimes take so damn long to get a connection?

As it turns out, engineers don't really know. Compared with network performance metrics like throughput and latency, the time spent actually waiting around while connecting to a network hasn't been studied much. A group of researchers led by Chinese computer scientist Changhua Pei is on the case, however, and they even have a new machine learning-based strategy that could dramatically improve connection times. Their work is described in a paper posted earlier this month to the arXiv preprint server: "Why it Takes so Long to Connect to a WiFi Access Point?"

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Data to study this question is plentiful. Pei and colleagues looked at connection data culled from five million mobile users from four representative cities who connected to seven million access points for a total of 400 million Wi-Fi sessions. The dataset came courtesy of the popular Android/iOS "WiFi Manager" app and is detailed enough to provide information about the various sub-phases underlying the connection process.