Proposal and Performance Evaluation of Information Diffusion Technique with Novel Virtual-Cell-Based Wi-Fi Direct

Wi-Fi Direct (WFD) has attracted much attention in recent years as a device-to-device communication technology that enables the sharing and diffusion of information in disaster areas that lack existing communication infrastructures. In WFD, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets establish communication groups (a wireless local area network (WLAN)), and transmit and/or receive data by Wi-Fi among devices autonomously. However, WFD is not effective for spreading data throughout a wide range because it randomly selects communication partners and needs to wait uselessly for random lengths of time to maintain access control. Thus, we propose a novel and efficient information diffusion method exploiting WFD and delay-tolerant networking (DTN). This method involves a unique virtual cell design based on device locations and enables efficient information diffusion without interference by assigning communication times to the virtual cells. As there is no deterministic means of evaluating multihop communication exploiting WFD and a mathematical model is needed to quantitatively indicate the performance of our method, we further construct a performance evaluation model using the reaction–diffusion model, which is a partial differential equation used to mathematically describe the spread of epidemic diseases. The effectiveness of this proposed diffusion method is evaluated exploiting the constructed model.