On the persistence of wireless advertising without infrastructure support

Abstract

The number of devices connected to the Internet keeps growing, and the traffic they collectively generate grows even faster, creating congestion issues, especially in the network access segment. Some of the newer Internet applications can however be served with device-to-device (D2D) opportunistic communications, thus offloading a portion of the traffic from the network. This thesis studies and presents experiments on the possibility of providing content availability to end user terminals by exploiting D2D infrastructureless connectivity and opportunistic communication. In order to avoid unrealistic assumptions on the behavior of D2D communications, the work includes and builds upon the implementation of an Android application that supports infrastructureless distributed content sharing between wireless devices using Wi-Fi Direct. The collected experimental data permit to analyze the occurring events and to assess and compare the performance of the class of services under evaluation against existing communication protocols.