Cloudless Wide Area Friend-to-Friend Networking Middleware for Smartphones

摘要

Swirlwave is a middleware that enables peer-to-peer and distributed computing for Internet-connected devices that lack publicly reachable Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, that can be expected to disconnect from the network for periods of time, and that frequently change network locations. This is the typical case for smartphones. The middleware fits into the friend-to-friend subcategory of peer-to-peer systems, meaning that the overlay network is built on top of already existing trust relationships among its users. It is independent of clouds and application servers, it supports encryption for confidentiality and authentication, and it aims to be easily extensible for new applications. The solution described in this paper is implemented for smartphones running the Android operating system, but its principles are not limited to this.