MobilePeerDroid: A platform for sharing, controlling and coordination in mobile android teams

Abstract

The fast development in mobile technologies and the continuous improvements in smart mobile devices, propelled by wide adoption of Mobile Cloud computing, have prompted for the development of a new generation of mobile applications aimed at supporting team work. Such applications provide great flexibility to workforce, especially groups of people developing teamwork both geographically distributed and on the move. The ability of being able to work according to the A3 paradigm, namely, Anytime, Anywhere, Awareness, significantly improves the teamwork performance. Relevant examples of such applications are found in businesses–especially Small and Medium size Enterprises–, online collaborative learning in Virtual Campuses, Social Networking, disaster management scenarios, etc. However, designing and developing such mobile collaborative applications requires overcoming many issues and challenges. Among these, there are three main pillars of such applications, namely, sharing, controlling and coordination. In this paper, we present MobilePeerDroid a platform that support sharing, controlling and coordination in mobile android team. The platform is based on P2P architecture to achieve flexibility, efficiency and scalability. The platform has been instantiated for teams of members using mobile devices under Android. In addition, it enables extensions (via separation of concerns and modularity) with new features for supporting new application development.