Peerwise Content Distribution for Mobile Platforms

Nadav Aharony, Chaim Kutnicki

• The Gist
  Using mobile wireless pocket devices, users generate and seamlessly share content with different groups and communities that they belong to, such as: friends, family, co-workers, or the general public. A user would simply walk into a meeting or pass by a fellow group member and automatically receive new and relevant files.

• The Vision
  Imagine a platform that lets news, publications, and user content migrate through a community in a flurry of direct, person-to-person interactions. We create a form of journalism and content publication where the information is physically held in common by all. It can be thought of as a "hot potato" with a trail - information is passed among people as they quite literally pass by each other, leaving bits and tidbits in personal, portable devices. The owners, creators, and viewers of the information are also the ones holding it. In the long term the proposed system would most likely end up as an integral part of a mobile phone, complementing its current functionalities.
  
  Personal journalism and publishing will be available to everyone and made easier than ever before – anyone could use their mobile devices to take notes, record pictures, videos, and sounds of their lives, documenting events as they happen – and immediately start broadcasting them to anyone interested and eligible. The way people think about information and journalism would be transformed. Information would no longer be seen as an object, residing in a device or on a website, a file that needs to be manually copied, emailed, or sent to someone. Information would become a free entity, roaming the airwaves, located nowhere and everywhere at the same time, announcing itself to the people that it knows would be interested in what it has to say and at the same time are permitted to access it.

• The Snap N’ Share System
  We are developing a wireless communication system that allows publication and dissemination of content among its users, giving them a service that is free, unsupervised, uncensored, and as private or as public as they would like. The system implements an ad-hoc, wireless, peer-to-peer information system that bypasses the need for any centralized servers, coordination, or administration. The system will combine usage simplicity with a novel networking engine that allows for increased performance and scalability over the existing state-of-the-art. Finally, the system would be available both as a software upgrade for existing consumer devices, or as a stand-alone device.

• This work is part of Project Medley
  As part of the Medley project and the general idea of personal, close vicinity communications, we look at different aspects of data sharing between members of a community where there is better connectivity among group members than to a core network at large. We face research questions of how information is distributed, what conflicts there are between memory, energy, and communication costs, how one integrates local storage, and how we can use social parameters (e.g. friendships) to determine routing. Additional research interests relate to the human interface aspect - what parts of the platform do we want to expose to the user and/or give him control over, and what parts we want to make transparent.

• Acknowledgments: We thank Nokia Research Center Cambridge (NRCC) for their generous donation of N800 Internet Tablet devices for the use of this project.