Reducing Delay in Group Reformation in WiFi Direct Networks Through Redundancy

Abstract

The potential benefits of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) have led to the development of many protocols in order to control and optimize such networks. However, the automatic creation and evolution of ad hoc networks has yet to be exploited. 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 and includes different energy management mechanisms. However, the current WiFi Direct implementations require user interaction for setting up and maintaining the connection. In this work, we exploit redundancy to enable the automatic and fast reconfiguration of WiFi Direct networks in response to network dynamics. We propose a proactive solution to unforeseen group owner failures in order to minimize the packet loss and network discontinuity time by setting up a redundant group on a second virtual network interface. Through emulation on Mininet-WiFi, we find that the proposed redundant scheme substantially decreases packet loss, providing almost continuous connectivity among nodes, which cannot be guaranteed through traditional WiFi Direct schemes. This is the first detailed work examining the auspicious potential of using an additional network interface to support network reformation using WiFi Direct.