An infrastructure-less peer-to-peer framework for mobile handheld devices

Mobile handheld devices are becoming more and more widely common among users. Their increasing computing and storage capabilities together with the widespreading of new wireless communication technologies, enable these devices for new and useful applications. The peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm, which has recently experienced a wide diffusion among internet users, seems to be very well suited to effectively support mobile applications. However, several questions arise when trying to develop such systems: existing solutions do not address all the requirements of these mobile environments. In this paper, we present a framework to develop mobile applications that exploits the P2P paradigm: it is designed to work on Java micro edition (J2ME) enabled mobile devices, interacting each other in an ad hoc fashion. One of the key features is to be interoperable with JXTA, a well-known P2P open platform, by extending the advantages of P2P computing to mobile computing environments. A simple but effective example of application is also provided showing the viability of the designed framework.