EDWiN : leveraging device-to-device communications for Efficient data Dissemination over Wi-Fi Networks

International audienceAn emerging usage is to rely on mobile devices (Smartphones or tablets) for large-scale events. They can be used for many applications like live voting or chatting, but also to access all the data related to an event. However, in such case, handling mobile devices trying to access data simultaneously is difficult. A Wi-Fi access point can only handle a limited amount of devices. Current solutions, relying on pre-loading data on the devices or over-sizing the network equipments are not satisfying and are not even always possible. We propose an approach that leverages the capability of mobile devices to interact directly through device-to-device (D2D) communications. Our solution can be tuned to choose the right level of parallelization to cope with radio interferences, it also provides the ability to adjust the trade-off between efficiency and energy consumption. We evaluate our approach using a discrete event simulator. The results show that our approach using D2D communications brings a 30% gains with our simulation