IMobile ME — A Lightweight Mobile Service Platform for Peer-to-Peer Mobile Computing

Abstract

As mobile devices become increasingly more powerful in storage, computation power, and communication capabilities, we anticipate an emerging need for a mobile device to access information or services on other mobile devices. A mobile device, however, may still be limited by its physical size, battery power, and intermittent communication capabilities. To facilitate information exchanges among these mobile devices, we propose a lightweight service platform on each mobile device and a network-based, always connected proxy that routes requests and responses among these devices. The lightweight platform adopts the notions of devlets and infolets in iMobile Standard Edition (SE), a proxy-based mobile service platform, to provide communication and information access interfaces on each mobile device. We call this lightweight platform iMobile Micro Edition (ME). ME devlets allow the local user and remote devices to communicate with the ME dispatcher through various communication protocols. ME infolets provide access to resources available on the mobile device. The ME dispatcher arbitrates communications among the front-end devlets and the backend infolets. To handle intermittent connections and varying bandwidths, each devlet or infolet with remote access is extended with an inbox queue that accumulates incoming messages and an outbox queue that accumulates outgoing messages — until a synchronization request with the network-based proxy (iMobile SE) is activated. The iMobile SE proxy synchronizes its message queues with those of mobile devices that attempt to communicate with each other. The collaboration of iMobile ME platforms and an SE proxy provides a lightweight infrastructure that enables new peer-to-peer mobile applications to be developed quickly for various mobile devices.