6^thMiNEMA workshop

Peer to Peer Collaborative Working Environments over Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Marco Boero, Softeco Sismat, Nicolas Berthet (THALES Communications, France), and the POPEYE Consortium
Project website: http://www.ist-popeye.eu

POPEYE is a European research project investigating innovative solutions for Peer-to-Peer collaboration over mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs).

POPEYE is developing a collaborative framework to support:

• Opportunistic ad-hoc networking: meet and join enable creative usage of networked portable devices without the need of supporting infrastructure
• Spontaneous networks: set-up quickly working groups dependable and secure with or without relying on an infrastructure suitable for professional usage

Next generation collaborative systems will offer the mobile user seamless and natural collaboration amongst a diversity of agents within distributed, knowledge-rich and virtualised working environment. However this ambitious goal needs to face numerous challenges from the underlying communication infrastructure through to the high level application services which, depending on the operational need to address, can receive different answers both technological and scientific.

When most of the currently available tools supporting collaboration exploit a rigid client-server architecture and rely on a communication infrastructure like the Internet, POPEYE's ambition is to get collaborative working free from such constraints.

The main objectives of POPEYE include:

• draw out an integrated overlay networking architecture that combines the stability and performance of infrastructure networks (when available) with the flexibility and spontaneous character of mobile ad hoc communications
• develop a communication platform to provide efficient P2P management and communication primitives
• develop higher-level context-aware, secure and personalised core services to facilitate application development by allowing the combination of user preferences with ambience information, such as time, location, user activity, and peers' presence

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A Context-Aware Instant Messenger

Lars Geiger, Frank Dürr, Kurt Rothermel, Universität Stuttgart, Germany

Instant Messaging allows the direct communication between users all over the world, using short, usually text-based messages ("chat"). Services like ICQ, Google Talk or Skype have become increasingly popular and are more and more coming to mobile devices.

In our demonstration, we present Conny, a next generation instant messenger. Conny utilises the user context to disseminate messages intelligently.

While the user previously had to select communication partners from a personal contact list, Conny users can contact other people who are in a specified context. Users can also subscribe to messages on certain topics or on their current location. This enables users to filter out interesting information from a vast amount of messages based on their context.

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Deployment and maintenance of applications in distributed EVOLVing environments

Bart Elen, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
Project website: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~barte/devolve/

Deploying and maintaining non-distributed applications currently are easy tasks which often only require clicking a setup.exe icon. However, the deployment and maintenance of distributed applications in large, dynamic operational environments are significantly more complex.

This complexity is caused by:

• Distributed deployment: distributed applications require application software to be installed and updated on multiple devices. The amount of work for the user grows when more devices are involved. Further, the user typically has to configure the application software on each device with IP-addresses to 'wire' the distributed application together.
• Evolution of the distributed environment: In contrast to the deployment of non-distributed applications, the deployment of distributed applications does NOT stop once the application software is installed on all devices. Each time devices are added, removed, moved to another location (e.g. to the DMZ), ... we may have to install, remove or reconfigure application software.
• Distributed software dependencies: The software dependencies between the application software on the different devices form an additional challenge. Changing the application software on one device may break the software dependencies with the application software on the other devices. The user needs to detect and resolve the unmet software dependencies to allow the application to operate correctly.

In this demonstration, we present dEVOLVe, an extension for the OSGi framework which is able to reduce the difference in complexity between the deployment of distributed and non-distributed applications in dynamic environments.

With dEVOLVe, we narrow the gap between the deployment of distributed and a non-distributed applications. dEVOLVe automatically deploys, updates and uninstalls application software on the different devices. Further, dEVOLVe is able to detect changes in the distributed network environment and will automatically adapt the application composition accordingly.

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Using Non-Java OSGi Services for Mobile Applications

Jan S. Rellermeyer, ETH, Switzerland
Project website: http://r-osgi.sourceforge.net

OSGi is a widely used framework for building complex software systems out of reusable Java modules. The OSGi specification describes an infrastructure for managing software modules at runtime and composing loosely-couples applications by connecting the modules through services.

With R-OSGi, we have extended the scope of OSGi from module management to distributed deployment management by applying the OSGi concepts to networks of applications consisting of distributed services.

Unfortunately, OSGi is Java-centric and, thus, not trivially transferable to other languages without losing generality and interoperability. Nevertheless, the OSGi model is rather general and could be applied in a wider setting.

In this demo, we will show how recent extensions to the R-OSGi platform allow even non-Java services to participate in virtual OSGi applications.

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