An energy efficient routing protocol for device-to-device based multihop smartphone networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is the need of the hour in the domain of next generation wireless networking and in the rapidly evolving smartphone network world. D2D technology facilitates mobile users to communicate with each other directly, bypassing the cellular base stations. As a popular D2D technique, WiFi-Direct is also a budding new technology that has the ability to set up wireless communications between a group of smartphones. While single-hop D2D based networks have been promising and energy efficient, multi-hop D2D based networks, though demanded in some emerging applications, are not well studied. In this paper, we elaborate the concept of multihop smartphone networks based on WiFi-Direct and propose an energy efficient cluster-based routing protocol, QGRP, to address the energy issue of increasing importance due to high energy costs of smartphones. Simulations demonstrate that QGRP can save significant amounts of energy compared to the cases without QGRP.