Ubiquitous Interpersonal Communication over Ad-hoc Networks and the Internet

The hardware and low-level software in many mobile devices are capable of mobile-to-mobile communication, including ad-hoc 802.11, Bluetooth, and cognitive radios. We have started to leverage this capability to provide interpersonal communication both over infrastructure networks (the Internet), and over ad-hoc and delay-tolerant networks composed of the mobile devices themselves. This network is decentralized in the sense that it can function without any infrastructure, but does take advantage of infrastructure connections when available. All interpersonal communication is encrypted and authenticated so packets may be carried by devices belonging to untrusted others. The decentralized model of security builds a flexible trust network on top of the social network of communicating individuals. This social network can be used to prioritize packets to or from individuals closely related by the social network. Other packets are prioritized to favor packets likely to consume fewer network resources. Each device also has a policy that determines how many packets may be forwarded, with the goal of providing useful interpersonal communications using at most 1% of any given resource on mobile devices. One challenge in a fully decentralized network is routing. Our design uses Rendezvous Points (RPs) and Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) for delivery over infrastructure networks, and hop-limited broadcast and Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) within the wireless ad-hoc network.