IP2P: a peer-to-peer system for mobile devices

Peer-to-peer communications is a major trend in wireless Internet. In a P2P system, the calling peer must identify the network address of the called peer before establishing a P2P connection. This article proposes iP2P, a hybrid P2P system for mobile devices. iP2P utilizes the short message service as the control protocol to identify the address of the called peer. Our approach provides an efficient identification mechanism without the requirement for the maintenance of a centralized registrar server in a hybrid P2P system. We also show how iP2P can integrate effectively with the existing network address translation traversal mechanisms to solve the private IP address issue.