ShAir: Extensible Middleware for Mobile Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing

Daniel J. Dubois¹ Yosuke Bando^1,2 Konosuke Watanabe^1,2 Henry Holtzman¹
¹MIT Media Lab ²TOSHIBA Corporation

ShAir is a middleware infrastructure that allows mobile applications to share resources of their devices (e.g., data, storage, connectivity, computation) in a transparent way. The goals of ShAir are: (i) abstracting the creation and maintenance of opportunistic delay-tolerant peer-to-peer networks; (ii) being decoupled from the actual hardware and network platform; (iii) extensibility in terms of supported hardware, protocols, and on the type of resources that can be shared; (iv) being capable of self-adapting at run-time; (v) enabling the development of applications that are easier to design, test, and simulate. In this paper we discuss the design, extensibility, and maintainability of the ShAir middleware, and how to use it as a platform for collaborative resource-sharing applications. Finally we show our experience in designing and testing a file-sharing application.

Paper (2.2MB, PDF):
Proceedings of the 9th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and
the ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (Industrial Track), pp. 687-690, 2013.
- ShAir is middleware for resource sharing among mobile devices (middle layer).
- Applications (top layer) can use the middleware APIs to easily create and maintain opportunistic peer-to-peer networks.
- The middleware is independent of device hardware or network types (bottom layer).
- It is extensible in that new features (e.g., advanced peer-to-peer protocols) can be added as plug-ins (dotted parts).
Usage example:
A photo sharing Android app has been built on the proposed middleware.

Photo sharing app GUI Devices running the app and autonomously sharing photos
without using cellular networks or infrastructure WiFi hotspots

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Photo sharing app GUI		Devices running the app and autonomously sharing photos without using cellular networks or infrastructure WiFi hotspots