A synchronization framework for personal mobile servers

The recent growth in the mobile device market has proven the feasibility of mobile storage based consumer electronics products. One of the key features of personal mobile storage devices is the ability to synchronize content and metadata with other mobile and stationary devices. The main problem addressed is automatic data exchange and synchronization in the domain of personal mobile storage devices or personal servers. We present a synchronization framework for personal servers delivered in the form of user scenarios, derived system requirements, design decisions and a software components structure. The synchronization framework was validated through a working prototype which shows added functionality, such as: connectivity with various types of devices from different vendors, synchronization based on user preferences, content-aware synchronization filtering. In order to abstract from implementation specifics of different network protocols, a high-level object-based storage API has been defined.