Supporting Multi-hop Device-to-Device Networks Through WiFi Direct Multi-group Networking

TL;DR

This paper explores methods to enable multi-hop device-to-device networks using WiFi Direct on Android devices, addressing current limitations and demonstrating feasible solutions with trade-offs in energy and delay.

Contribution

It proposes and analyzes new solutions for interconnecting multiple WiFi Direct groups to support multi-hop ad hoc networks on Android devices.

Findings

Feasible multi-group WiFi Direct communication with manageable overhead

Techniques exploiting simultaneous connections outperform single-connection methods

Experimental validation confirms energy and delay trade-offs

Abstract

With the increasing availability of mobile devices that natively support Device-to-Device (D2D) communication protocols, we are presented with a unique opportunity to realize large scale ad hoc wireless networks. Recently, a novel D2D protocol named WiFi Direct has been proposed and standardized by the WiFi Alliance with the objective of facilitating the interconnection of nearby devices. However, WiFi Direct has been designed following a client-server hierarchical architecture, where a single device manages all the communications within a group of devices. In this paper, we propose and analyze different solutions for supporting the communications between multiple WiFi Direct groups using Android OS devices. By describing the WiFi Direct standard and the limitations of the current implementation of the Android WiFi Direct framework, we present possible solutions to interconnect different groups to create multi-hop ad hoc networks. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches are feasible with different overhead in terms of energy consumption and delay at the gateway node. Additionally, our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of techniques that exploit the device ability to maintain simultaneous physical connections to multiple groups.