Cocoon: A lightweight opportunistic networking middleware for community-oriented smart mobile applications

Modern society is surrounded by an ample spectrum of smart mobile devices. This ubiquity forms a high potential for community-oriented opportunistic ad hoc networking applications. Nevertheless, today’s smart mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and wristbands are still onerous to automatically establish mobile ad hoc connections with our physical circle of friends and between occasional contact opportunities. Motivated by this, this study presents Cocoon as a lightweight middleware proposed for smart mobile platforms to support mobile opportunistic communications for general public use. Cocoon employs an adaptive context-aware service that can fairly coordinate a multitude of concurrentlyrunning networking applications. Along with this service, the opportunistic networking service of Cocoon facilitates fast and reliable information sharing between participating devices according to our real-world applicability and validation experiments presented in this work. The routing protocols of Cocoon are designed above the universally-accepted Wi-Fi and Bluetooth standards. Without requiring any configuration or modification on top of the affiliated wireless interfaces, Cocoon is therefore suitable for direct use on any kind of smart mobile platform. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )