Wi-Fi Peer to Peer (P2P), commercially known as Wi-Fi Direct, is a recent industry standard that allows user devices to communicate with each other without requiring a Wi-Fi access point or Internet connectivity. Offering promising solutions for secure and high-throughput device to device communication over moderately high range, Wi-Fi P2P can potentially revolutionize M2M communication and Internet of Things (IoT) towards an all-connected wireless ecosystem. Secure Digital (SD) memory cards with built-in processing unit and Wireless LAN chipset can serve as a small standalone communication terminal which on installation of a communication protocol stack and a data-sharing application may enable connection establishment and data communication between memory cards. Such architecture may find interesting applications with manifold advantages for device-to-device data sharing in public gatherings without requiring cellular network or WLAN access points. In this paper, we develop an architecture to establish Wi-Fi P2P connection between SD memory cards and enable automatic data sharing by proximity-based device-to-device communication between mobile user equipments. The prototype does not use any of the resources of host device barring power. The key contribution of this paper is the development of a standalone prototype of our proposition on off-the-shelf WLAN SD memory cards and its experimental performance evaluation.

WiFi Peer to Peer (P2P) aka WiFi Direct enables devices to communicate with each other in a peer to peer manner without requiring any Access Point at typical WiFi speed with WPA2 security. With its huge prospect in revolutionizing device to device communication, WiFi P2P can potentially play a much larger role amid the growing interest in M2M communication and Internet of Things. However, unlike a conventional P2P network which operates on mesh topology, WiFi P2P requires one of its group members to act as Group Owner, with whom all the other devices in the group stay associated. The group suffers from a temporary network disruption when the Group Owner suddenly leaves the group without any prior notice. In addition, restoration of the group connectivity consumes much time which is intolerable for most delay sensitive applications. In this paper, we address this issue using our proposed concept of Seamless Group Reformation which helps in maintaining near continuous connectivity and alleviates over dependence of the group on the Group Owner. The concept is seconded by the proposed mechanism of Dormant Backend Links to cut down the total group-disruption time. We implement the mechanism of Dormant Backend Links on a practical WiFi P2P testbed and present an experimental evaluation.