Using Client-Server Applications in Proximity Networking

Abstract:
Our daily environment is becoming well networked. People are using mobile devices to access services available in their current environment. Proximity network is a new kind of environment, which belongs to the class of ad hoc networks with only single hop links. Ad hoc type environment is a problematic environment for legacy or client-server applications that expect availability of Internet infrastructure services like DNS. In order to work in spontaneous networks legacy applications need additional support, e.g., to locate the services and to replace missing infrastructure services. We present a solution that modifies network socket interface implementation so that additional functionality is executed when a terminal is in a spontaneous network. This includes adaptively deploying multicast DNS, SLP to locate the services and to determine correct IP addresses for the legacy applications. The solution also incorporates selected server functionality to mobile terminals so that they can serve other terminals when needed. As an example we use SIP and games to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution.