Maintaining Connectivity in Ad Hoc Networks Through WiFi Direct

The wide diffusion of mobile devices that natively support ad hoc communication technologies has led to a number of protocols for enabling and optimizing Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Nevertheless, the actual utilization of MANETs in real life is still limited, in part due to the lack of protocols for the automatic creation and evolution of ad hoc networks. Recently, a novel ad hoc protocol named WiFi Direct has been proposed and standardized by the WiFi Alliance with the objective of facilitating the interconnection of nearby devices. WiFi Direct provides high performance direct communication among devices, includes different energy management mechanisms, and is now available in most modern mobile devices. However, the current WiFi Direct implementations require user interaction for setting up and maintaining the connection. In this paper, we propose and analyze three practical schemes for creating self-organizing and self-healing WiFi Direct networks using Android OS devices. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches are feasible with different overhead in terms of prior knowledge about the network and coordination between the devices. These techniques provide the first known approaches for the automatic creation and maintenance of MANETs using every day mobile devices.