Abstract

Wi-Fi Direct is a recent expansion to the very successful 802.11 Wi-Fi technology. According to Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi Direct is being broadly adopted, among others by Google’s Android (since version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich). However, to the authors’ knowledge no formal testing of Wi-Fi Direct throughput, latency, packet loss and energy use on smartphones has been performed.

This thesis presents practical measurements of Wi-Fi Direct capabilities on Android smartphones in practical use-case driven applications. It was found that Wi-Fi Direct would be well suited to content sharing applications and possibly also gaming applications. Furthermore, tests showed that Wi-Fi Direct is more sensitive to communication range and uses more energy compared to standard Wi-Fi. However, with some improvements to this technology, also discussed in this thesis, and on-going development in Android, Wi-Fi Direct could become a reliable and ubiquitous device-to-device communication medium.