android - How to get the client device details which is connected to wifi hotspot?

Question

I am connecting different devices with wifi hotspot AP programatically in my android app, How can i detect the clients being connected and disconnected and to the wifi hotspot AP Programmatically ? Is there any callback event in Android API to give information regarding the connection or disconnection events of individual devices ? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no public API to give information about this... But you can read /proc/net/arp file and see the clients connected to your Access Point.

/proc/net/arp file have 6 fields: IP address, HW type, Flags, HW address, Mask and Device

The problem is when a client get disconnected, because it doesn't disappear from the file. A solution may be to do ping to every client and wait for response, but for me this isn't a good solution because some clients don't respond to ping. If you like this solution check this project on GitHub --> https://github.com/nickrussler/Android-Wifi-Hotspot-Manager-Class/tree/master/src/com/whitebyte

What i have did is: read /proc/net/arp and check the FLAGS field, when the value is 0x2 the station is connected and 0x0 is disconnected, but to refresh this field I need to clear ARP cache from time to time, and i did it with this command: ip neigh flush all

I hope i helped you