Wi-Fi Direct (formerly Wi-Fi P2P) is appearing in more and more smartphones these days and despite not having used it so far for anything useful I thought I’d investigate a bit more to see how it works and how it differs from Bluetooth in addition to the obviously higher data transfer rates.

Unlike many other Wi-Fi functionalities, Wi-Fi Direct is not specified by the IEEE. Instead, the Wi-Fi Alliance, best known for it’s Wi-Fi certification program and logo, was responsible for the feature. It’s not their first one, they were also the driving force to fix the WEP encryption issue many years ago with WPA and later WPA2. Also, they have defined the set of rules for Wireless Multi Media (WMM) and other options in the IEEE standards to ensure the implementation of a minimum set of features and interoperability between devices.

In essense the Wi-Fi direct feature is straight forward. While traditional Wi-Fi networks require an access point for devices to communicate with each other, Wi-Fi direct allows two devices to communicate with each other without a dedicated access point. Instead, one of the two devices assumes the role of the access point and becomes the Group Owner (GO) of the Wi-Fi direct network. Other devices, even non-Wi-Fi direct devices, can then join this group as the GO behaves just like a standard access point.  This means that the GO device also includes DHCP functionality to assign IP addresses to clients of the group network.

Once the Wi-Fi connection is established and an IP address has been assigned the standard TCP/IP protocol stack is used to transfer data between devices. And this is the biggest difference between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi direct. While Bluetooth defines profiles for transferring images, business cards, calendar entries, audio signals, etc., Wi-Fi direct itself only offers a transparent IP channel. To transfer data between two devices, compatible apps are required.

The advantage of this approach is that those apps can work in Wi-Fi direct networks and also in traditional Wi-Fi environments. A TV, for example, that is capable of traditional Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi direct can run a server application to receive pictures and video streams over both Wi-Fi variants. The home owner would stream his material over the traditional Wi-Fi network while visitors would use Wi-Fi direct to skip the somewhat complicated process of joining the local wireless infrastructure network.

The disadvantage of this approach in the example above is that the visitor has to first download a client app that can communicate with the server app on the television. While this might be acceptable for the scenario above, it’s too complicated for just exchanging a few images, files or contacts on the go between two smartphones. Perhaps Google will add such apps to Android in the future to make this easier but this wouldn’t help transferring files to the iPhone, Blackberries, Windows Phone, etc. This is where Bluetooth still shines due to its standardized profiles which are implemented on many operating systems. This is a bit unfortunate as transferring multimedia content between different mobile operating systems would definitely benefit from fast Wi-Fi transmissions due to ever increasing file sizes and the practical transfer speeds of Bluetooth of only around 2 Mbit/s.

In practice, Wi-Fi direct has arrived in Android smartphones today but is not really noticed so far. The Android OS offers an API for apps from version 4 of the OS to scan for Wi-Fi direct devices and then to establish a connection. That offers interesting possibilities for ad-hoc communication, such as for example local multi-player games. Think kids in cars on a long road trip…