Application Level Quality Measurement of Heterogeneous Device-to-Device Links

Device-to-device (D2D) links enable direct communication between mobile devices without using the cellular network or the Internet. This type of communication can be helpful in situations when there is a partial or complete failure of the network infrastructure. However, effective use of D2D links for a multi-hop D2D communication system requires quick and practical quantification of their quality from user space of devices. We developed an Android application to search and measure the quality of available D2D links nearby. This application can search for heterogeneous (i.e., Bluetooth and WiFi Direct) D2D links simultaneously and measure the link quality from the user space. We run indoor and outdoor experiments to examine how line-of-sight or non-line-of-sight D2D links perform.