Live Streaming over Wi-Fi Direct Multi-Groups

Mobile devices such as smartphone and tablet are widely used as a popular communication tool in recent years. However, they could not be fully utilized without dedicated infrastructure such as base stations of cellular network and/or access points of wireless LAN. In this paper, we propose a method to realize a live video streaming to geometrically distributed subscribers without relying on a communication infrastructure. The proposed method organizes a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) by collecting Wi-Fi Direct groups consisting of nearby mobile devices. After organizing a MANET, the source explores a route to the subscribers by applying a variant of AODV, and the video stream issued by the source is delivered to the subscribers along established route in a store-and-forward manner. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a prototype system consisting of twelve Android tablets. The result of evaluations indicates that it could stably deliver a live video stream of QVGA quality to subscribers located at 200 m away from the source. In addition, it could quickly recover from link failures in about 12 sec, which is significantly shorter than the normal AODV.