Is there any android phone supports purely ad-hoc mode communication?

[Haiqing Jiang]

Hi, all,

Thanks for reading this email. I am thinking of is there any android could support adhoc networks? I mean, it's not hotspot mode. It's purely adhoc, peer-to-peer. Or do you guys know any custom kernel/firmware support that?

If there is none, could we implement it in current android platform? What could be the workload and challenges? Any hints? 

Thanks, 

Haiqing

[William Roberts]

Not sure but I think the hardware needs to support it too. So you may want to find hardware that can do that...

[Kristopher Micinski]

Typically hardware supports it, but generally chipsets either have
infrastructure or ad hoc mode as an xor.

For example, you can change to ad hoc mode using iwconfig, on a rooted phone..

This project http://code.google.com/p/adhoc-on-android/ presents a
high level implementation, but you probably don't want to use it for
anything real..

If you're talking about other ad hoc implementations, you can find
these as well, but they're mostly hacky. What level of realism do you
want? If you are just interested in a hacky thing for research, then
you can sort of hack it up using a combination of high and low level
support (as in that library), if you want something more production
stable you definitely need to make your own firmware, most of the
pieces are already in the kernel, however.

kris

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 10:14 AM, William Roberts
<bill.c....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not sure but I think the hardware needs to support it too. So you may want to find hardware that can do that...
>

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[Haiqing Jiang]

Thanks, Bill.....

I am checking whether galaxy nexus phones could support it.....

[Haiqing Jiang]

Hi, Kris,

Thanks..... The project website you provided is good for me. Actually what i want is not productive aim.... I just want to implement pure ad-hoc network using smartphone in my research project. 
The hacky prototypes are good for me. And Any other good sources you have e.g., websits or mailist, please let me know. 

Thanks a lot,

Haiqing

[Kristopher Micinski]

So as I said, it depends on how realistic you want the network setup to be.

For example, if you're doing real networking research, you probably
need an implementation at the lower level because you don't want the
performance or implementation portion of your research to be bogus..

But if you're doing research where the actual transmission medium is
not so important, you can get away with something a little higher
level. What typically happens in ad hoc network research is something
like this:
- your paper postulates the existence of some imaginary network
protocol that you can optimize or something..
- You could implement it for real in the kernel, but that's sort of
hard and requires (honestly) a lot of low level programming experience
and overall zest for network stack hacking.
- If you're not that good (I'm usually not) you develop something
like an overlay atop a partially existing network protocol at a higher
level (I've done this before..)

You may be interested in this:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/p2p/package-summary.html
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82

kris

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-platform/-/TZvV24tqK5UJ.

[Kristopher Micinski]

As I remember, I saw a p2p overlay for Android being proposed by
Quallcom (iirc) a while back that used Bluetooth.. I can't find it
now, things like this were what I did when I was back in the network
hacking game..

kris

[Haiqing Jiang]

HI, Kris,

What did you mean by the following sentences?

"

This project http://code.google.com/p/adhoc-on-android/ presents a 
high level implementation, but you probably don't want to use it for 
anything real.. 

"

I did check the source codes of this project. It seems like the guys had implemented the libraries needed by purely adhoc networks on android phones. 

Did you check that before? Could we use it in the real adhoc usage case? Or it's not a real implementation of adhoc on android? It's not implementing wifi adhoc (hotspot). 

Hopefully it could be the one I could use to the case where two phones can communicate in peer-to-peer (like in wireless sensor networks) but not in wifi hotspot mode. 

And also they did provide any documentation regarding the integration to AOSP. 

Thanks,

Haiqing

[Kristopher Micinski]

What I mean is basically:

this is somebody's academic project, it hasn't been used for real
scenarios, it's probably relatively stable (or at least, hopefuly),
but it wasn't necessarily developed to be deployed in an industrial
setting, so I can't in good faith say you can take it off the shelf
and use it for ad hoc routing. Also, as most of the implementation is
in Java, rather than at a lower laywer, you might also have qualms
with that...

If you're also working on academic research, this seems like an
excellent choice, however. I certainly don't mean to downplay the
development..

kris

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-platform/-/nZHOCmROJ7gJ.

[Kristopher Micinski]

Also, read the sentences:

"The current supported Android phones are HTC Hero, Nexus One and HTC
Dream, though only the first two phones are actually tested."

That sounds like a no go to me...

kris

[Haiqing Jiang]

Thanks... I will go deep into it from now on......