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

Abstract

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.