Mobile Peer Group Service Platform
ART/054CP
20081216 - 20091215
6446
Dr Shen-chang Chao
There will be four deliverables in this project. They are listed as follows:
• A Mobile Peer Group Service Platform
This deliverable is a software development platform. The most significant layer of this platform is the technology framework that enables mobile, peer-group-based services. Such service applications will be built on this platform.
• Peer-group based applications
Prototypical applications will be built to showcase the functionalities of the MPG Service Platform. The applications to be built will demonstrate a mobile peer group for off-line social networking, sharing of Internet access resource among a wireless LAN peer group. We will also analyze the performance issues of media delivery applications within a wireless LAN peer group.
• Explore business relationships with potential partners
We will explore the business opportunities with service providers and enterprises that can benefit from this technology. This relationship may be in the present licensing model or in the Enterprise and Consumer Electronics (ECE) Domain’s upcoming application partnership model, in which ECE offers the source code of the platform to vendors to build innovative applications.
• Patent application
For the patent application, there are many potential topics in this area. The area that we will file patent would likely be a virtual resource framework for mobile and stationary peer pairing.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is the next generation networking and content distribution technology that has enabled many new applications. Within a peer group, peers can form a network to communicate and share resources without the burden of deploying centralized control. P2P is the underlying networking technology for services such as collaborative work, social networking, content sharing, etc. So far in the applications involving P2P, such as video streaming and file sharing, the peer devices are mainly desktop computers. Mobile devices’ intrinsic limitations, such as power consumption, bandwidth and storage, make them a very poor fit with peer-to-peer operations. This project will introduce a technology framework to address these issues. With existing technologies like peer protocol and peer discovery as the foundations, a mobile peer-group service would allow mobile devices to participate in P2P-type applications. A mobile peer can find another peer in the group to interact socially and share user-generated contents. With the help of the framework, the issue of resource limitations in peer-to-peer operations would be minimized on the mobile device.