Towards a Real-Time Data Sharing System for Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are increasingly used for information sharing. The sensors embedded inside these devices are generating a range of information about their location, surrounding environment and user activities. This information can be shared with others in real-time so that it can be used or analysed instantaneously. The popularity of participatory sensing involving humans and mobile devices(phones, PDAs, tablets etc) has also fuelled the growth of large scale data management. Although the typical network bandwidth available in mobile devices has been improving it remains limited with the rise in communication activity. Therefore, data could be optimised on the device to make it more suitable for the available network bandwidth. A scalable real-time data sharing system can be built by using existing message formats, messaging architectures and compression techniques. We will look at the bandwidth limitation and scalability issue with special focus on the impact of message compression in such networks.