Cloudless Friend-to-Friend Middleware for Smartphones

Abstract

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.