D2D communications for mobile devices: Technology overview and prototype implementation

The mobile devices of today evolve towards offering uninterrupted connectivity while attempting to achieve untethered mobility of their users. Further technological advances in hardware often lead to an increased data consumption. Combining these two factors, we notice that the data rates on the current Internet connections are starting to lag behind. Ultimately, we observe a mismatch between the data transfer rate requirements and the actual throughput availability. In this paper, we utilize direct links between proximate devices to help offload the large amounts of user-originated data from the conventional cellular links. The paper explores the implementation possibilities of this technology on the consumer Android devices, as well as substantiates our application development choices. The proposed approach employs the infrastructure-based connections for coordination, while most data transfers happen over the device-to-device links. This allows the developers to utilize our data offloading platform for other proximate applications.