Case Study on a Community-Centric Mobile Service Environment

This paper discusses and evaluates the design and the implementation of a Community-centric Mobile Service Environment (COMSE), where all services are developed with Web technologies. The service environment is built on a distributed communication platform that is implemented using a DHT-based peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol. The interaction between P2P overlay networks and Web-based services is realised with a mobile middleware component called P2P Daemon. By using P2P Daemon as a gateway, Web-based services are able to utilise P2P overlay networks for community management, service publishing and discovery, as well as data storage. This case study highlights the opportunities of using P2P and Web technologies collaboratively in mobile settings. Special focus is on technical evaluation of the COMSE with two pilot services that were tested by genuine users in a real usage environment. As performance criteria, we used nodes’ messaging load, success ratio of P2P operations, and latencies of successful P2P operations. The evaluation results show that it is technically feasible for mobile nodes to use Web-based services in community-centric P2P overlay networks. Our findings suggest that the load inflicted on mobile nodes for maintaining small-sized P2P overlay networks is at an acceptable level, since the mobile nodes are able to stay online up to 8 hours before running out of battery.