GOCRGO and GOGO: Two minimal Communication Topologies for WiFi-Direct Multi-group Networking

Although mobile devices can collaborate and interact when connected by a communication infrastructure, such interactions may also be greatly desired or even highly necessary when such infrastructures are not available or cannot be used, like in crowded spaces, disaster situations, and remote areas, or when there is no trust in the existing infrastructures. A major requirement to support such autonomous collaborative systems on top of mobile devices is to build a communication network to interconnect them all. In this quest, Wi-Fi Direct (WFD) stands out as a promising technology to offer infrastructure-less WiFi networking to off-the-shelf devices. However, the WFD standard only addresses communications inside one group of devices, and current WFD inter-group communication solutions have several limitations, as they must contend with intermittent connections, slow communication (broadcasts and/or multicasts), and/or a high number of nodes to interconnect groups. In this paper, we aim to overcome those limitations by proposing two novel topologies, named GOCRGO and GOGO, which use permanent radio connections, can rely on either UDP or TCP communication, and require the minimum number of nodes necessary to interconnect WFD groups. Both topologies present advantages over each other, in different scenarios, and thus can be used together in a complementary way.