Towards Cloudless Co-located Social Media on Android

Abstract

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous. However, they often do not equate with access to communication services. Indeed, many of the 60 million people forcibly displaced worldwide who have access to mobile devices, lack communication services due to lack of infrastructure or lack of Internet credits. In this research-in-progress, we provide the basis to create cloudless co-located social media on Android. To do so, we present a novel middleware solution called PadocAndroid, which allows multihop ad hoc communication between off-the-shelf Android devices. We also present experimental results and a proof-of-concept chat application to illustrate the usage of the middleware.