ShareFile: Sharing Content Through Device-to-Device Communication

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has gained attention due to its potential to reduce data traffic in mobile operator networks. Several models and algorithms for efficient D2D communication have been proposed recently. However, despite the availability of D2D communication technologies in most current devices, there are few real-world performance evaluations using such communication model. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper presents an experimental evaluation of D2D communication using off-the-shelf devices. To achieve this goal, we propose ShareFile, a tool to measure the performance of content sharing through Wi-Fi Direct in Android devices. We deployed a testbed to compare the performance of D2D communication against centralized or non direct solutions. The results demonstrate that even small distances degrade D2D communication performance. The time to find nearby devices ranges from 400ms to 1.5s, while time to establish a connection can reach 6s and the flow rate reaches up to 6.5MBps, which is close to the 7.9MBps achieved by cloud solutions.