Pear2Pear (On Wifi): A Data Sharing Protocol Over Wifi through a Peer to Peer Network

A peer-to-peer system is a distributed system in which equal nodes (in terms of role and usage) exchange information and services directly. This paper describes a distributed peer-to-peer protocol that allows wifi-enabled smart devices (especially Android smartphones) to exchange data using only wifi. The protocol is designed to allow the automatic establishment of a distributed peer-to-peer network of any size without geography constraint. It is applied to file sharing between devices, but can easily be adapted to support any data sharing. The protocol defines two layers: (1) a kernel layer responsible for creating, routing, establishing and maintaining links between nodes (peer), addressing a node and adding and removing nodes; and an (2) application layer to support data sharing (file sharing in this case). The structure of the peer-to-peer network is hybrid. Regarding the file sharing use case, the application allows a node to (i) search for a file in the catalog of its subnet that is held by the root node, and (ii) download a file: if the file is not in the subnet, the root node delegates a node to make vouchers in neighboring subnetworks to get the file and make it available. A proof of concept was made on Android.