HSNet: Energy Conservation in Heterogeneous Smartphone Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years mobile computing has been rapidly expanding to the point that there are now more devices than there are people. While once it was common for every household to have one PC, it is now common for every person to have a mobile device. With the increased use of smartphone devices, there has also been an increase in the need for mobile ad hoc networks, in which phones connect directly to each other without the need for an intermediate router. Most modern smart phones are equipped with both Bluetooth and Wifi Direct, where Wifi Direct has a better transmission range and rate and Bluetooth is more energy efficient. However only one or the other is used in a smartphone ad hoc network. We propose HSNet, a framework to enable the automatic switching between Wifi Direct and Bluetooth to emphasize minimizing energy consumption while still maintaining an efficient network. We develop an application to evaluate the HSNet framework which shows significant energy savings when utilizing our switching algorithm to send messages by a less energy intensive technology in situations where energy conservation is desired. We discuss additional features of HSNet such as load balancing to help increase the lifetime of the network by more evenly distributing slave nodes among connected master nodes. Finally, we show that the throughput of our system is not affected due to technology switching for most scenarios.