An energy consumption model for WiFi direct based D2D communications

WiFi direct is a variant of Infrastructure mode WiFi, which is designed to enable direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communications between proximity devices. This new technology enables various proximity-based services such as social networking, multimedia content distribution, cellular traffic offloading, Internet of Things (IoT), and mission critical communications. However, energy consumption of battery-constrained devices remains a major concern in all the aforementioned applications. In this paper, we model energy consumption of the WiFi direct protocol, starting from device discovery to actual data transmissions for intra group D2D communications. We simulate a content distribution scenario in Matlab and analyze our model for the energy consumption of the devices. We argue that the energy spent in device discovery becomes significant in the case of small data sizes. In particular, we find that smaller data sizes, such as 100KB, cause the equal amount of energy to spend in both device discovery and data transmission phases, even when the device discovery time is very small.