Quantifying Direct Link Establishment Delay Between Android Devices

Abstract

The enormous success of direct communication applications has shed light on the practical interest of Device-to-device (D2D) communications. However, to set up a direct link between two neighboring nodes, they have first to detect each other, which introduces a delay before they can start sending and receiving data. The link establishment delay can be particularly unfavorable in situations of strong mobility, as the availability of the direct communication link depends on how long the devices stay within communication range of each other. This paper reports on our experiments to evaluate the link establishment delay. We focus on Android devices and use the Nearby Connection Application Programming Interface (API), which supports Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to perform link connectivity. In a nutshell, we observe that the link establishment delay requires several seconds to complete in the case of Bluetooth Classic and even tens of seconds for BLE.