Group formation and communication in mobile wireless environments

Use of Wi-Fi-capable mobile handheld devices is gaining momentum on university campuses and other campus-like environments. In addition, users often work as a group to perform collaborative tasks. Consequently, there is a demand for group communication applications in mobile devices and a need to provide middleware support for such group communication. This paper presents two common grouping scenarios as observed on campuses. We then present data dissemination strategies for these grouping scenarios. We concentrate on update-based applications such as updates for file repositories and version controlling systems. Thus, the group communication protocols for data dissemination will use short messages encapsulating control messages and updates. We evaluate the effectiveness of the protocols through an Android based middleware implementation as well as simulations. Our experiments demonstrate that the protocols deliver the updates to the entire group of users within desired(low) time bounds in real life scenarios.