iOS WiFi probe interval - ios

Question

I am writing an app which connects via WiFi to a proprietary device. The proprietary device acts as a WiFi access point.
When the device powers down, the WiFi connection is terminated, as I would expect.
The iPhone continues to send probe requests, looking for networks to connect to. It follows an exponential backoff algorithm for sending probes.
My problem is that eventually the intervals between the probe requests sent by the iPhone are longer than the timeout on my device, so they don't make a connection.
I am using the Reachability code and it works as I would expect.
It seems that pressing the home button will reset the backoff and send a probe request immediately. Does anyone know of a way to have my app do something similar?
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Instead of pinging the internet every time with Reachability, ping a host on the local network like the DNS server or the router (192.168.1.1).

Answer 2

I somehow experienced a similar situation to check if the device was connected in a specific VPN connection. The approach was to ping to a machine in the local network, via standard ping or implementing a ping web service.
If you don't have a backend in your local network then the easiest would be the ping. You can check the following code example from the Apple developer site:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/SimplePing/Introduction/Intro.html

Answer 3

I would suspect that if you reconfigure the connection (re-set the WiFi configuration) in your app that the iPhone would restart scanning without the backoff. So your app could keep track of how long it was since the connection was lost and then reconfigure the link after an appropriate amount of time. Possibly you would have to reconfigure to a different SSID and then switch back, depending on how smart the iOS-libraries are.

Answer 4

I'm not shure, if i understand you right. You want to check if the device is still connected to the access point?
I've build an app to connect to a scanner via wifi, the scanner acts as access point. for that i check if the SSID the device is currently connected to is the one of the scanner. to check the CurrentSSID you can use the following code:
+(NSString*)currentSSID {
CFArrayRef myArray = CNCopySupportedInterfaces();
CFDictionaryRef myDict = CNCopyCurrentNetworkInfo(CFArrayGetValueAtIndex(myArray, 0));
if (!myDict) {
return nil;
}
NSDictionary *myDictionary = (__bridge_transfer NSDictionary*)myDict;
return [myDictionary objectForKey:#"SSID"];
}
hope that helps.

Answer 5

I am afraid there is no way of doing so without being rejected during the review (you could read on how to access the SBWifiManager). Apple does not enable any way to access the wifi manager from the sandbox environment. I experienced similar issue connecting my device to various access points (for locating with probe request), up to now with the iOS 7 the probe requests were sent between huge intervals (even 15 min). Try to modify your access points.