A Runtime Framework for Context-Sensitive Device-to-Device Communication

Abstract

Mobile applications and Internet of Things applications increasingly require one mobile device to exchange data with another collocated device. Despite the introduction of multiple standard device-to-device communication protocols (i.e., WiFi direct, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, NFC), transferring data across devices remains hard for mobile programmers for three reasons. 1) different devices support different D2D communication interfaces, and therefore the available D2D communication channels are dynamically decided by the peers; 2) different D2D interfaces have different features (connection establish time, data rate, energy consumption) and different performances under different contexts, complicating the decision which channel to use; 3) implementing and debugging data transmission functionalities requires knowing the low-level details of communication protocols, which is difficult and error prone. To solve the above mentioned problem, this paper presents a runtime framework for context-sensitive device-to-device communication. The presented framework consists of two major components: 1) a set of encapsulated D2D data transmission interfaces to reduce the programming efforts; 2) a context-sensitive communication channel selection algorithm to select the optimal communication channel as defined by the dynamic context. We design and implement the runtime framework, and evaluate its performance in terms of the required programming effort, energy consumption and data transmission latency under different contexts.