Understanding the Networking Performance of Wear OS

Abstract

Networking on wearable devices such as smartwatches is becoming increasingly important as fueled by new hardware, OS support, and applications. In this paper, we conduct a first in-depth investigation of the networking performance of Wear OS, one of the most popular OSes for wearables. Through carefully designed controlled experiments conducted in a cross-device, cross-protocol, and cross-layer manner, we identify serious performance issues of Wear OS regarding key aspects that distinguish wearable networking from smartphone networking: Bluetooth (BT) performance, smartphone proxying, network interface selection, and BT-WiFi handover. We pinpoint their root causes and quantify their impacts on network performance and application QoE. We further propose practical suggestions to improve wearable networking performance.