WiFi and BLE advertisement based communication for ephemeral interactions: A survey

Abstract

The growing demand for services that are instantly accessible and contextually adaptive calls for communication paradigms capable of supporting short-lived, proximity-based interactions. This paper investigates association-less communication, a paradigm that enables nodes to exchange data without pre-established connections, making it well suited for ephemeral interactions. We first formalize association-less communication as a distinct paradigm and establish a unified evaluation framework by systematically analyzing eleven wireless technologies against topological, performance, and deployment criteria. This analysis identifies Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as the most practical and widely available enablers of such connection-free exchanges. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first to provide a structured, comparative, and design-oriented analysis of both paradigms—Wi-Fi Beacon Stuffing and BLE connectionless mode—under a unified conceptual framework. Building on this foundation, the paper examines their performance across three critical application domains: vehicle-to-pedestrian safety systems, proximity marketing and emergency message dissemination, and sensor networks. Through this comparative assessment, the paper highlights their respective strengths, trade-offs, and design implications in terms of range, latency, energy efficiency, and implementation complexity. Finally, it outlines key research directions, including middleware abstractions, hybrid cross-technology integration, content-based filtering, and mobile gateway architectures. The outcomes of this study contribute a unified framework and a practical foundation for developing efficient, scalable, and real-time ephemeral communication systems.