An Experimental Study on Multihop D2D Communications Based on Smartphones

Cellular networks operators is facing one great challenge on how to manage the exponential data traffic increase. Mobile data offloading can be a low-cost and efficient way to relieve the pressure of cellular networks. Among various offloading techniques, device-to-device (D2D) communications has gained more and more attention. However, current studies mainly concentrated on traffic offloading between two user equipments directly, i.e., single-hop D2D and most of them are theoretic works. In this paper, with smartphones we build a multihop D2D communications platform which can expand the application scenarios of single-hop D2D communications. We utilize the platform to measure and analyze some important performances of multihop D2D communications and experiment results demonstrate the importance of multihop to D2D communications. The performances include energy consumption, network delay, coverage and link quality. We believe our work can provide a valuable reference to the works of multihop D2D communications based mobile data offloading and other related ones.