🧵 Could Bitchat have 5x the range and 100x the throughput for the same power expenditure? I explored how Wi-Fi Aware could improve the reliability and throughput of Bitchat and mobile ad-hoc networks in the absence of internet connectivity. #bitchat 👇

1/ Bitchat today uses a BLE mesh for ad-hoc messaging without internet access. BLE is ubiquitous and low-power, but its short range (≈10–30 m) and low throughput can limit the real-world reliability and coverage of offline mobile ad-hoc networks that depend on it.

3/ Wi-Fi Aware throughput is orders of magnitude higher than BLE. In practice, Wi-Fi Aware's range on mobile devices can also be significantly higher than BLE. In tests, we saw ~4-5× improvement. Increased range means fewer devices are needed to form a reliably connected network.

4/ Surprisingly, the power cost during discovery was similar between BLE and Wi-Fi Aware, thanks to the optimizations of the Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN) protocol underlying Wi-Fi Aware. Active transfers consume more energy, but support significantly higher data rates.

5/ Wi-Fi Aware has challenges: cross-platform support isn’t uniform; pairing flows and asymmetric connection limits complicate mesh formation; hardware support varies. But they're not insurmountable, and Wi-Fi Aware could be used today to improve Bitchat and similar networks.

6/ Wi-Fi Aware would complement BLE as a secondary transport to boost connectivity or enable high-throughput direct messaging. BLE provides a backbone for a ubiquitous baseline mesh. Wi-Fi Aware enables extended range and higher-bandwidth hops when devices both support it.