LocalCloud: Relaying Data Shared in Opportunistically Created Local Ad-hoc P2P Networks
Motivation
The idea of the LocalCloud concept is inspired by patterns observed in disasters with large geographic extension.
For instance, the 2010 Chile earthquake which created islands of connectivity scattered along the affected territory, with people moving across these islands. This behavior shows an interesting opportunity to use devices in order to establish serendipitous communications on the move allowing to pass data across separated islands of connectivity.
Store-carry-and-forward mechanisms have already been used successfully in other networks with restricted availability such as FIDOnet, which in the mid 90’s used residential phone calls to move millions of message posts and emails across BBS systems.
Vision
The vision of this concept rests on following technological pillars:
- Opportunistic creation of mesh of portable wireless devices through an overlay P2P network
- Interconnecting to local clouds to share text/media over peer-to-peer communication channels
- Store-carry-forward synchronization of moving peers (re-) joining new clouds and build temporary bridges between offline and online areas
- Spread information using everyday services to distribute it to the population via known channels
Technology
The implementation is based on:
- Wi-Fi capabilities available in off-the-shelf portable wireless devices
- Prefixing SSID to indicate the presence of a local cloud
- Handshaking method to negotiate coincidental P2P communications
- Using open-source libraries (Twitter4j, Alljoyn)
For future work, we will investigate how to optimize the dynamics of cloud creation, merging and interconnection.
