Mobile Plug-and-Play Architecture for Collaborative Hybrid Peer-to-Peer Applications

Increasing heterogeneity of networks, services and applications emphasizes the need for middleware as an essential part of the information technology infrastructure. To implement novel 3G and beyond 3G mobile applications and services, the light-weight middleware utilizing application supernetworking- and hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) - client/server concepts can be considered. Application supernetworking means collaboration of applications that utilize a set of common functionalities for sharing contextual information and managing sessions and connectivities. Hybrid P2P - client/server concept aims to optimize the network system features by exploiting the advantages of both the P2P and client/server domains. Hybrid scenarios could include e.g. utilizing secure client/server -based authentication for P2P networks. We have developed a plug-and-play application platform (PnPAP) mobile middleware to support novel application development and improved user experience. PnPAP provides support for seamless usage of multiple simultaneous applications, protocols and network connectivities. Required user interaction is reduced and new collaborative application scenarios, utilizing both P2P- client/server networks, are enabled. For the application developers, PnPAP enables faster development cycle by providing a unified API definition for protocol, session and connectivity management. Functionalities of the PnPAP core are controlled with state-machines, where the rules of operation can be dynamically updated over-the-air by the service provider. This enables managing the heterogeneity in a more flexible way than in the traditional systems given in this document.