A Peer-to-peer Framework for Mobile Collaboration

The paper describes a framework used to develop mobile collaborative applications in Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME). The framework focuses on the support for same-placesame-time collaboration on mobile phones utilising personal area networks (PANs). We believe that the PAN technology available on mobile phones enables for a broad range of new collaborative applications supporting collocated work and spontaneous interaction. Today, such applications can be developed using J2ME along with PANAPIs like the Bluetooth API supported by the most recent mobile phones. However, these APIs lack of high-level peer-topeer primitives, so the developers have to focus too much on the technical aspects and not the collaborative aspects. Our framework provides the necessary high-level concepts to develop collaborative peer-to-peer applications and is independent of the underlying PAN technology. This paper describes the concepts, the design, and results from developing applications using our framework.