Design and implementation of a middleware for ad-hoc multi-hop networking on Android

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Currently on smartphones, short distance wireless communication between multiple phones mostly relies on existing network infrastructure, which has some limitations and is not flexible enough for many networking scenarios on smartphones. An ad hoc networking support on mobile devices operating system is desired by many mobile application developers. The aim of this thesis is to implement a Java based middleware on Android platform for multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networking over IEEE 802.11. The Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) [2] is implemented for route discovery and the Reliable User Datagram Protocol (RUDP) [3] is applied for reliable user data delivery. The implementation is developed in the user space of Android system and requires few kernel modifications, so the system can be easily ported to different phone models. The application interface provided by our middleware service is simple and easy to use, so the implementation could be a good underlying ad-hoc networking support for developing Android applications. In this report, the design and implementation of the middleware is presented and experiments have been done to evaluate the routing and throughput performance of the implementation. To verify the correctness and effectiveness of our implementation, a demo file sharing application is developed on top of the middleware.