Optimizing energy in WiFi direct based multi-hop D2D networks

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has changed the way people socially interact with each other. A huge increase in the usage of social media applications has been observed due to quarantine strategies enforced by many governments across the globe. This has put a great burden on already overloaded cellular networks. It is believed that direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communication can offload a significant amount of traffic from cellular networks, especially during scenarios when residents in a locality aim to share information among them. WiFi Direct is one of the enabling technologies of D2D communications, having a great potential to facilitate various proximity-based applications. In this work, we propose power saving schemes that aim at minimizing energy consumption of user devices across D2D based multi-hop networks. Further, we provide an analytical model to formulate energy consumption of such a network. The simulation results demonstrate that a small modification in the network configuration, such as group size and transmit power can provide considerable energy gains. The observed energy consumption is reduced by 5 times for a throughput loss of 12%. Additionally, we measure the energy per transmitted bit for different configurations of the network. Furthermore, we analyze the behavior of the network, in terms of its energy consumption and throughput, for different file sizes.