Evaluation of contact synchronization algorithms for the Android platform

Abstract

Synchronization protocols have been widely investigated in distributed systems aiming to achieve real-time and scalable properties. With the fast development of large-scale distributed systems, and due to their heterogenous nature involving wired, wireless, and mobile nodes, synchronization has again come into play. In this work, we have studied contact synchronization and handling, which is an important feature in corporate environments. Indeed, it has become very important to support collaboration of teams of mobile users by enabling anytime and anywhere access to shared contact data. We characterize the problem as a distributed systems problem, identify its desirable properties, and outline its main characteristics. A simple algorithm is proposed as an efficient solution to contact synchronization when some nodes of the system are assumed to be mobile phones under the Android operating system. The features required at both ends of the distributed system are explained in order to guarantee the correctness of the algorithm. We also analyze the implementation of the algorithm coupling the Android platform and the SugarCRM server, and provide an experimental evaluation of the performance of the proposed approach.