Peer-to-peer communication on android-based mobile devices: Middleware and protocols

There has been an increasing interest of a wide number of scholars and researchers in promoting the applications for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication in Androidbased smartphones as ubiquitous. Such increasing interest has been attributed to their increasing perception of these devices. There is a wide use of many P2P applications in mobile devices. These applications include IM, VoIP, file sharing, social networks, and video streaming. This paper describes a proposed Android-based middleware acts as the interface point between mobile nodes and higher application layers for mobile ubiquitous computing. The middleware mainly aims at supporting and enhancing the protocols for direct P2P communication among users in the ensemble mobile environment. Moreover, the paper presents a discussion of the available P2P middleware for the mobile environment along with its applications. Furthermore, the paper moves on to providing the mobile devices limitations and the challenges encountered in the adoption of the P2P communication technology in the mobile environment. Finally, the paper is concluded by presenting the directions for future research as to develop a middleware with necessary APIs and implement an enhanced P2P protocol in the proposed middleware on Android-Based mobile devices.