With the increasing availability of mobile devices that natively supportDevice-to-Device (D2D) communication protocols, we are presented with a uniqueopportunity to realize large scale ad hoc wireless networks. Recently, a novelD2D protocol named WiFi Direct has been proposed and standardized by the WiFiAlliance with the objective of facilitating the interconnection of nearbydevices. However, WiFi Direct has been designed following a client-serverhierarchical architecture, where a single device manages all the communicationswithin a group of devices. In this paper, we propose and analyze differentsolutions for supporting the communications between multiple WiFi Direct groupsusing Android OS devices. By describing the WiFi Direct standard and thelimitations of the current implementation of the Android WiFi Direct framework,we present possible solutions to interconnect different groups to createmulti-hop ad hoc networks. Experimental results show that our proposedapproaches are feasible with different overhead in terms of energy consumptionand delay at the gateway node. Additionally, our experimental resultsdemonstrate the superiority of techniques that exploit the device ability tomaintain simultaneous physical connections to multiple groups.
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