PhoneNet: a phone-to-phone network for group communication within an administrative domain

This paper proposes PhoneNet, an application framework to support direct group communication among phones without relay nodes. PhoneNet presents the familiar abstraction of a multi-user chat service to application writers. It performs two main functions: inviting participants to the chat room and routing data between participants directly without going through any intermediaries. Made possible by a generic chat room service embedded in the network itself, all application-specific code in PhoneNet applications runs on the phones themselves. Unlike the conventional server-client model, this design does not require scalable central servers that can handle all simultaneous interactions. As a first step, we have created a prototype of PhoneNet that works within an administrative domain. The multicast functionality among phones is implemented on top of a software-defined network (SDN). We have developed two applications using PhoneNet: teleconferencing and photo-sharing. Our experience suggests that it is easy to develop PhoneNet applications and PhoneNet appears to be effective in reducing network traffic.