Energy Efficient Phone-to-Phone Communication Based on WiFi Hotspot in PSN

Pocket Switched Networks (PSN) utilize both human mobility and occasional connectivity to transfer messages between mobile humans' devices. Recently, a large number of mobile phones have come into our daily lives. Therefore, the PSN composed of human-carried mobile phones will be an ubiquitous network environment in the near future. In this paper, it is proposed that the WiFi hotspot mode of a mobile phone is applied in the PSN, in order to realize the phone-to-phone communications. However, due to the lack of energy supply, a phone in hotspot mode could rapidly consume energy and shorten its battery lifetime significantly. To maximize the message dissemination scope within the limited energy constraint of each phone in PSN, an Energy efficient Phone-to-phone Communication method based on WiFi Hotspot (EPCWH) is presented to schedule the phone's switch between hotspot mode and client mode. Simulations based on the synthetic random-waypoint mobility pattern are conducted in ONE; the results show that EPCWH achieves the best performance in terms of message dissemination and energy consumption among different switch strategies.