Mobile peer-to-peer approach for social computing services in distributed environment

Abstract

This paper presents a mobile peer-to-peer approach that can be applied to build social computing services in distributed environment. This approach features peer-to-peer networks with the support of mobile devices that allows users to participate in social computing services including data sharing and searching services. Due to the limitations of system resource and network connectivity, mobile peers cannot easily undertake complicated operations, such as processing complex queries, indexing and transmitting large amount of data. This approach employs a super peer peer-to-peer network to deal with the problem of peer heterogeneity. It uses workstations as peers to assist mobile peers with insufficient storage, bandwidth and processing capability in dealing with complicated operations, while mobile peers possess ordinary operations such as publishing and searching data. We have extended the Gnutella protocol to provide operations on peers and mobile peers. The evaluation of the prototyping system has performed on a number of laboratory workstations and Android emulators to investigate the feasibility and scalability of the system.