Cloudless Friend-to-Friend Middleware for Smartphones

Using smartphones for peer-to-peer communication over the Internet is difficult without the aid of centralized services. These centralized services, which usually reside in the cloud, are necessary for brokering communication between peers, and all communication must pass through them. A reason for this is that smartphones lack publicly reachable IP addresses. Also, because people carry their smartphones with them, smartphones will often disconnect from one network and connect to another. Smartphones can also go offline. Additionally, a network of trusted peers (or friends) requires a directory of known peers, authentication mechanisms, and secure communication channels. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer middleware that provides these features without the need for centralized services.Comment: ICETE 2018: E-Business and Telecommunications pp 199-218. Part of the Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS, volume 1118). The final authenticated publication is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34866-3_1

Swirlwave. Cloudless wide area friend-to-friend networking middleware for smartphones

Swirlwave is a middleware that enables peer-to-peer and distributed computing for Internet-connected devices with the following characteristics: The devices lack publicly reachable IP addresses, they can be expected to disconnect from the network for periods of time, and they 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 has built in encryption for confidentiality and authentication, and it aims to be easily extensible for new applications. The solution described in the thesis was implemented for smartphones running the Android operating system, but its principles are not limited to this