Demo: Application Prototyping for Wireless Proximity Networks

We present some of our experience on prototyping applications to run on, what we call, proximity networks. We mean here by proximity networks, networks of local devices that can be formed between users of a specific community to establish communication and perform some tasks. Our prototyping device is the Nokia N800 Linux-based WiFi tablet [1]. The N800 operating system is a modified version of Debian GNU/Linux, including an X-Windows-based graphical user interface, which makes it an ideal development environment for providing many of the tools available and known to Linux developers. N800 is supported by an open-source development platform called Maemo [2]. The first application is a group messaging application between devices forming a multi-hop proximity network. Devices in proximity join the same ad-hoc mode WiFi network and