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I'm a bit confused about the new Wi-Fi Direct feature in Android ICS. Is it possible to create a P2P group with multiple devices, and send multicast packets from a source peer to the other peers?

Unfortunately, I don't have any devices that are Wi-Fi Direct enabled, so I can only browse the examples that I find online. In these examples, I could only find peers establishing 1-on-1 connections. So, is multicasting possible?

Brendan
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Zsombor Erdődy-Nagy
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1 Answers1

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Is it possible to create a p2p group with multiple devices ?

Based on the Industry white paper and the technical specs, yes it is possible to create a group with multiple devices, you will have a one-to-many connection, one Group Owner (GO) and many clients.

Send multicast packets from a source peer to the other peers?

Based on the technical specs, the GO shall act as a DHCP server and provide an IP address to the connected clients (which should act as a DHCP client). Each device can easily know its own IP and the GO's IP, so it should be possible to do a broadcast using the address 255.255.255.255.

Regarding a proper multicast, I am not sure, I guess it depends on the capabilities of the DHCP server created.

Fabien Demangeat
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