VirtualConnection: Opportunistic Networking for Web on Demand

Social networks such as Facebook and Secondlife are popular. Wireless devices abound from affluent countries to developing countries. Social networks need wide area Internet support. Wireless interfaces offer ad hoc networking capability, without the need for infrastructure support. Web on Demand (WoD) aims to bridge the gap between ad hoc social networks (people in close proximity with shared interests) and ad hoc networking. A key requirement for WoD is transparent connection management. This paper makes three contributions: First, an abstraction called VirtualConnection for transparent connection creation and migration, with socket-like API; second, an implementation on iPAQs (Windows Mobile) as a user level library, and proof of efficacy of using this abstraction for realizing WoD; third, evaluations to establish the performance of this abstraction. In particular, we show the performance degradation due to virtualizing the connection is negligible.