Collaborative Data Processing on Mobile Handsets

Mobile phones have become a basic commodity and smartphone devices claim a continuously increasing market share. Modern smartphone devices are equipped with powerful processing units and high speed mobile internet capabilities. Mobile operators in turn are offering a wide variety of data plans. These developments will lead to an increase of internet access from mobile devices. At the same time the internet is not solely used anymore for displaying data but collaborative editing, evaluation and distribution of data in any form has become widely popular, as can be seen in the socalled “Web 2.0” services. Suppliers are offering versions of these services that are especially designed for mobile devices. Today Peer-to-Peer networks are responsible for a considerable amount of the total internet traffic. Although Peer-to-Peer networks mainly gained attention in the media for copyright infringement cases Peer-to-Peer networks offer many positive characteristics. Peer-to-Peer networks are decentralized, self-organizing, scalable and offer no single point of failure. This makes Peer-to-Peer networks an ideal candidate for deploying mobile web services. The MobP2P base system is a foundation for developing Peer-to-Peer based applications for collaborative data processing developed for the Android platform. Applications built on top of the MobP2P base system enable users to create data items and to share these with remote users. Alterations to these data items are automatically synchronized on authorized devices.