Contact Synchronization for the Android Platform

Synchronization protocols have been widely investigated in distributed systems aiming to achieve real time and scalable properties. With the fast development of large scale distributed systems and due to their heterogenous nature involving wired, wireless and mobile nodes, synchronization has come again to play. In this work we have studied the contact synchronization and handling, which is an important feature in corporate environments. Indeed, it has become very important to support collaboration of teams of mobile users by enabling anytime and anywhere access to shared contact data. We characterize the problem as a distributed systems problems, identify its desirable properties and outline its main characteristics. A simple algorithm is proposed as an efficient solution to the contact synchronization when some nodes of the system are assumed mobile phones under Android system. The needed features on both ends of the distributed system are explained in order to guarantee the correctness of the algorithm. We also analyze the implementation of the algorithm coupling the Android platform and the Sugar CRM server and provide some experimental evaluation on the performance of the proposed approach.