Peer-to-peer information sharing in a mobile ad hoc environment

With the rapidly increasing adoption of more and more powerful wireless-enabled personal mobile devices, users are facing new opportunities and challenges in making connections with other users in order to share relevant information. This is especially true, given the dynamic nature of potential interactions between typical mobile users. Peer-to-peer applications have established themselves as a popular and effective method for information sharing in static environments, and our research is examining the issues involved in peer-to-peer application deployments for dynamic mobile ad hoc environments. The natural context of direct local proximity between peer devices coupled with user preferences as a context for information filtering provides a powerful mechanism for dynamic and opportunistic information exchange. In this paper, we demonstrate how peer-to-peer protocols can be successfully implemented in a mobile ad hoc environment, in order to enable information sharing applications. We discuss the issues involved in the design and implementation of mobile deployments of peer-to-peer applications, and we illustrate these approaches in an information sharing application for Bluetooth-enabled mobile users.