Testing Nearby Peer-to-Peer Mobile Apps at Large

While mobile devices are widely adopted across the population, most of their remote interactions usually go through Internet. However, this indirect interaction model can be assumed as inefficient and sensitive when considering communications with neighboring devices. To leverage such weaknesses, nearby peer-to-peer(P2P) communications are now included in mobile devices to enable device-to-device communications over standard wireless technologies (WiFi, Bluetooth). While this capability supports the design of collaborative whiteboards, local multiplayer gaming, multi-screen gaming, offline file transfers and many other applications, mobile apps using P2P are still suffering from app crashes, battery issues, and bad user reviews and ranking in app stores. We believe that this lack of quality can be partly attributed to the lack of tool support for testing P2P mobile apps at large. In this paper, we introduce a testing framework that allows developers to automate reproducible testing of nearby P2P apps. Beyond the identification of P2P-related bugs, our approach also helps to estimate the discovery settings to optimize the deployment of P2P apps.