WiFi Local Area Network Research Articles

A hybrid Wi-Fi P2P with bluetooth low energy for optimizing smart device’s communication property

Recently, due to the popularity of smart devices, a need for various types of wireless communication has been tremendously increasing and several types of radio technologies for easy and quick communication with peripherals have appeared. In order for implementing a Personal Area Network (PAN), low power ZigBee and Bluetooth technologies have been generally used. On the other hand, Wi-Fi Local Area Network (LAN) technology has many advantages in implementing a PAN as it’s chipset is integrated and it’s transmission speed is relatively higher than the others. As the size of multimedia data like photos, videos, and music files has increased, more efficient communication environment for faster connection establishment and higher data transmission speed should be supported for end users accordingly. Because Bluetooth technology has intrincic limitations like transmission speed and coverage, new technologies are expected to provide longer transmission distances and higher transmission rates. Further, if the full functionality of Wi-Fi P2P standard would be implemented for today’s smart devices, it would be possible to provide various kinds of mobile innovative services that could maximize user experience. Transmission rate of Bluetooth technology in early stages was only up to 1Mbps. Although this speed is as fast as 6-fold compared to existing techniques, Bluetooth can hardly support a satisfied level of services to transfer large amounts of data such as high quality musics and videos. Therefore, Bluetooth has been used only for specific communication services with limitations. Transmission speed of Bluetooth, however, has been significantly improved as time goes. That is, Bluetooth 2.0 released in 2004 supports maximum speed of 3Mbps, and Bluetooth 3.0 released in 2 009 supports up to 24Mbps. Bluetooth 4.0 released in 2 010 has low energy mode while maintaing 24Mbps and also supports coin cell with low power consumptioin. Wi-Fi P2P is a direct communication technology between terminals without any intermediate devices such as routers and access point (AP). Wi-Fi module is basically mounted on most of smart devices. Therefore, once Wi-Fi P2P technology is adapted to mobile terminals or mobile devices such as TV, laptop, printer, and camera, all the communication services and multimedia contents can be simply provided for these devices by using the Wi-Fi P2P. In this study, we have proposed a cross-layer system design for optimizing smart devices’ communication property by utilizing the characteristics of high-speed data transmission rate of Wi-Fi P2P and low power consumption communication of Bluetooth. We have also verified that the proposed technique outperforms the existing Bluetooth and Wi-Fi P2P in the comparison of throughput as well as transmission delay through OPNET simulations, which leads to faster user connections and provides better quality of services to end users.