With the increasing dependence on mobile devices and mobility, it is not longer just getting access to you email and contacts on the phone that is required but the solutions need to go one step beyond and build on the P2P to mobile devices

P2P for Mobile Devices

The Vision

· Devices are becoming network-aware

o Bluetooth

o WiFi

o IrDA

o GSM, GPRS, UTMS

· Problem:

o GPRS/UTMS is fairly expensive…

· What if sharing and communication between devices could be handled directly?

· Uses?

o killer application still missing (that is your mission)

o dynamic configured data radio networks used by troops in the field

o sharing of MP3s with other hip & trendy people at the café…

Challenges

· Network availability

o Mobile devices move by definition

§ in and out of range

· Limited bandwidth

o Bluetooth is not exactly speedy…

· Limited storage capacity

o compared to larger devices

Solutions – or attempts at solutions

· Store and Forward

o messages hop from one peer to another

o if connections can be broken at any moment, network communication must be very careful

· Dynamic routing

o the Internet is bad enough with regards to changing conditions, but this is ridiculous

o still an area of much research – not at all easy to create an efficient algorithm for routing packets in such a network

· MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Networks)

o There is an IETF working group on this topic

Another aspect would be creating a P2P system for Mobile Devices. Some of the key points while developing such a system would be having a Passive Distributed Index which would

· A mobile P2P system must be a “pure” P2P network

o we cannot rely on a central index – no peer has the resources and no single peer can reach all other peers

· How is searching accomplished across a dynamically changing network?

· The index must be distributed and dynamically updated

· Each peer maintains

o a document repository (documents have unique IDs similar to URLs)

o an index cache: (keywords, document ID)*

· Queries are broadcast and forwarded (with TTL)

· Responses (Query, Document ID*) are broadcast and forwarded (with TTL)

· A peer will update its local index cache based on the received responses and forward the responses to other peers

minus the Document IDs it already knew