Empowering Collaborative Application Development: A Robust Framework for Ad-Hoc Distributed Systems

The amalgamation of ubiquity, mobility, computing prowess, storage, and communication of the portable electronic devices including smartphones, wearable devices, tablets have significantly altered the fabric of human existence. The software applications for these mobile devices possess the capability to disseminate and receive information, thereby enable the development of applications that may execute in collaborative manner. However, in situations with ad-hoc connectivity unavailability of infrastructure and communication breakdown are common, which inhibit information sharing across the devices, and hence affect the applications running in the collaborative spaces. Further the applications developers face challenges while developing reliable collaborative applications that can seamlessly execute in ad-hoc communication settings with recurring issues with device connectivity. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a reliable framework to the application developers which provides such an abstraction that they may create robust applications without any concern about random communication disruptions. To address the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a framework that facilitates the development of reliable and efficient collaborative applications that communicate across devices while working in ad-hoc device connectivity settings. The proposed framework provides an abstraction of some major components including service exposition, service registration, storage, and synchronization while ensuring robustness to the challenges posed by the intermittent connectivity failures. The efficacy of the framework has been demonstrated through a detailed experimental evaluation using a custom developed collaborative application run in a variety of operational settings over different portable devices in ad-hoc settings. The results reveal that the framework not only successfully mitigates the challenges posed by the ad-hoc device connectivity, but also the abstractions provided by the framework not only enables the application developers create customized robust collaborative applications with significantly fewer lines of code, but also without worrying about the intermittent communication failures among the involved devices.