A Wi-Fi P2P communication platform between wireless LAN memory cards: Prototype implementation and performance evaluation

Abstract

Wi-Fi Peer to Peer (P2P), commercially known as Wi-Fi Direct, is a recent industry standard that allows user devices to communicate with each other without requiring a Wi-Fi access point or Internet connectivity. Offering promising solutions for secure and high-throughput device to device communication over moderately high range, Wi-Fi P2P can potentially revolutionize M2M communication and Internet of Things (IoT) towards an all-connected wireless ecosystem. Secure Digital (SD) memory cards with built-in processing unit and Wireless LAN chipset can serve as a small standalone communication terminal which on installation of a communication protocol stack and a data-sharing application may enable connection establishment and data communication between memory cards. Such architecture may find interesting applications with manifold advantages for device-to-device data sharing in public gatherings without requiring cellular network or WLAN access points. In this paper, we develop an architecture to establish Wi-Fi P2P connection between SD memory cards and enable automatic data sharing by proximitybased device-to-device communication between mobile user equipments. The prototype does not use any of the resources of host device barring power. The key contribution of this paper is the development of a standalone prototype of our proposition on off-the-shelf WLAN SD memory cards and its experimental performance evaluation.