Proximity

[600.647 - Advanced Topics in Wireless Networks]
Personal Networking Tool

Overview | Design | Implementation | Final implementation | Change log | Download

Team

Ajay Vyasapeetam
Petar Dimitrov
Razvan Musaloiu-E.
Raluca Musaloiu-E.

Project Description

Using the application the user can build a profile which contains information they want to share with other people. The profile will be structured in a strict way but it can contain a wide range of information: name, interests, favorite movies/music/books, blog entries etc. For each information the user can select a certain type of sharing: public, just for my friends, just for the friends of my friends or private.

When a user moves around, if he comes within range of someone who is running the same application they will automatically exchange profile information according to each user's policy. The application will also include the functionality of an instant messaging system by providing a simple text chatting.

The identity is based on self-certificates and the user can sign each others certificate.

The application will also maintain a graph with all the relations he recorded.

Motivation

The main motivation is that, most of the time, people are willing to share some information about them in order to gain a broad image about the others. An example of this is the success of various websites (Friendster, Orkut, Hi5) which provides a way of managing social networks. Doing the same thing based only on wireless connectivity makes sense because, most of the time, we are more interested in finding more things about the people in our close vecinity.

Usage Scenarios

Initial configuration:
- the user generates a new self certificate which will represent his identity
- the user build his profile by selecting a number of categories and filling the appropriate information
- the user selects the desired policies for each category
Obs: the user can also define new categories.

Unattended running:
- the application will periodically send a "I'm here" message on a certain multicast address
- the application will also listen on the multicast group for other people. When it hears about someone new it will retrieve the public information and store it in a cache (the user can later approve or search over this information). If it hears about someone it already know about it will check if the profile is up-to-date and if it's not it will retrieve the latest version.

Online mode:
- the application will provide a list of online people and the user can choose to engage in chats/conferences with them.

Supported Platforms

Any ad-hoc network (wired or wireless). We intend to develop it in Java.
Last update: Thursday, 11-Aug-2005 02:56:05 EDT