Phone-to-Phone Communication Utilizing WiFi Hotspot in Energy-Constrained Pocket Switched Networks.

In pocket switched networks (PSNs), devices carried by humans form a network environment, which utilizes both human mobility and occasional connectivity to deliver messages among mobile devices. Mobile phones are widely used in our daily lives. Therefore, the PSN composed of human-carried mobile phones will soon become an ubiquitous network environment. In this paper, we propose a communication strategy that applies the WiFi hotspot mode of a mobile phone in the PSN to realize the device-to-device communications. However, due to the lack of energy supply, a phone in hotspot mode could rapidly consume energy and shorten its battery lifetime significantly. To maximize the message dissemination scope within the limited energy constraint of each phone in PSNs, an Energy-efficient Phone-to-phone Communication method based on WiFi Hotspot (EPCWH) is presented to schedule the phone's switching between hotspot mode and client mode. Simulations based on the synthetic random-waypoint mobility pattern and real traces are conducted in an opportunistic network environment; the results show that EPCWH achieves the best performance in terms of message dissemination and energy consumption among different switching strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]