Wireless channel loss analysis - a case study using WiFi-Direct

WiFi-Direct, a Wi-Fi standard, enables devices to connect easily with each other without requiring a wireless access point and communicate at typical WiFi speeds for file transfer, Internet connectivity, etc. It is widely used in many applications such as the traffic local sharing. The loss model of WiFi-direct link can facilitate the theoretical analysis when designing or optimizing the systems hence it is an important issue to be investigated. But as far as we understand, no formal work has been done to analyse the WiFi-Direct channels. In this paper, we set up the experiments connecting two mobile devices using WiFi-Direct and analyzed the performance of the loss models in literature. A new model based on Gilbert-Elliot model was proposed thereafter and evaluated with likelihood criterion. The new model turned out to outperform others in the evaluation.