Using Infrastructure-less Wireless Networks to Synchronize Data among Mobile Devices: Extending UbiShare

Abstract

During the last ten years, social networking has become an integral part of modern society. People use the wide range of available social networking services to create relationships and communities, in which they share data with family, friends and co-workers. These social networking services works great for their intended purpose, connecting people, but a privacy issue arises when using such services. Even though you have the ownership of everything you share, you often grant the service provider the possibility to use your data as they please.UbiShare was proposed as a solution of this problem. By using UbiShare, innovative sharing applications could provide smaller, private communities, such as rescue crews, a way of communicating while in action. The idea was to use private social networks to enhance disaster management by providing an easy and intuitive way of sending messages and sharing data that would aid in decision making. This way, disaster management would be much easier to coordinate, but if the disaster wipes out communication infrastructure, the current version of UbiShare would not work.This thesis presents the development and evaluation of a data synchronization system that uses infrastructure-less wireless networks, such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct, as communication channel. By making this an extension of UbiShare, community members in close proximity can continue to share and synchronize data even when fixed internet infrastructure is inaccessible. The motivation behind this system is to show how it can enhance disaster management in situations when only infrastructure-less wireless networks are available.