An Experimental Study on Wi-Fi Ad-Hoc Mode for Mobile Device-to-Device Video Delivery

The demand for video content is continuously increasing as video sharing on the Internet is becoming enormously popular recently. This demand, with its high bandwidth requirements, has a considerable impact on the load of the network infrastructure. As more users access videos from their mobile devices, the load on the current wireless infrastructure (which has limited capacity) will be even more significant. Based on observations from many local video sharing scenarios, in this paper, we study the tradeoffs of using Wi-Fi ad-hoc mode versus infrastructure mode for video streaming between adjacent devices. We thus show the potential of direct device-to-device communication as a way to reduce the load on the wireless infrastructure and to improve user experiences. Setting up experiments for Wi- Fi devices connected in ad-hoc mode, we collect measurements for various video streaming scenarios and compare them to the case where the devices are connected through access points. The results show the improvements in latency, jitter and loss rate. More importantly, the results show that the performance in direct device-to-device streaming is much more stable in contrast to the access point case, where different factors affect the performance causing widely unpredictable qualities.