MANCAF: A Framework for Building Collaborative Applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents the MANCAF framework that enables programmers to develop mobile collaborative applications. The framework provides an API that is easy to adopt and capable of creating advanced collaborative applications. The framework was built to provide applications providing pure peer-to-peer network where all nodes have the same responsibility and services. Further, the MANCAF framework provides services to transparently manage the finding of new and lost peers. The message component of the framework makes it possible to exchange any kind of data between clients. The MANCAF has been implemented in Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) and runs on standard mobile phones. The framework supports management and communication of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) like Bluetooth. The paper describes the architecture, the API and the application developed using the MANCAF framework. Keywords— Collaborative Application, Framework Designing, Mobile Ad-hoc Network.