ConnMan supporting Wi-Fi


 * Summary: ConnMan supporting Wi-Fi Direct (p2p)
 * Proposer: Flavio Ceolin 

Description
Wi-Fi Direct (or Peer-to-Peer, P2P) is a technology which enables one device connects to another without joining a traditional network. It requires a special hardware and software, present in recent phones, tablets or development boards. Differently from an ad-hoc connection, Wi-Fi Direct supports wpa2 and allows devices to simultaneously connect to an existing wireless networks. Besides that, Wi-Fi Direct gives a good way for discovery devices and services using well known technologies Bonjour and uPnP.

Wpa_supplicant is the standard daemon providing WEP, WPA and other 802.11 services on Linux. Recently it started to receive some Wi-Fi Direct support under the feature name "p2p".

ConnMan is a software for managing internet connections with focus in embedded devices running Linux. It is a fully modular system that can be extended, through plug-ins, to support all kinds of wired or wireless.

The Wi-Fi plugin in ConnMan will be implemented using wpa_supplicant. The implementation of this project was briefly discussed with Marcel Holtmann (ConnMan's maintainer) and Gustavo Barbieri (barbieri@profusion.mobi). It intends to work with the existing Wi-Fi plugin and will talk with wpa_supplicant over DBus. After this project is done, ConnMan will be able to seamlessly scan and connect to Wi-Fi Direct peers whenever the hardware supports it.

The WiFi-Direct usage process can be separated in three differents parts: scanning/provision-discovery, wps and dhcp. Currently ConnMan plus wpa_supplicant has these three parts built in.

The benefit of adding this feature to ConnMan is create a solution for Wi-Fi device-to-device connectivity and also keep compatible existing with Wi-Fi features as tethering.

Related work

 * http://connman.net/
 * http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/
 * http://www.wi-fi.org/discover-and-learn/wi-fi-direct

Scope

 * 1) Discuss and resolve with community the approach to use (change the Wi-Fi technology or create a new technology): 1 week
 * 2) Implementation: 4 weeks
 * 3) Adapt community feedback, tests and upstream: 3 weeks

Contractor Candidates
Fl?vio Ceolin  (or co-workers from ProFUSION embedded systems)