BitHoc: A content sharing application for wireless ad hoc networks

As a result of the wide spread of new efficient mobile communication devices, users are more and more willing to find on these devices (PDAs, Smart-phones, etc) applications similar to the ones they are using on their desktop computers. We go one step in this direction and propose in this demo a software we have designed and implemented to enable content sharing among spontaneous communities of mobile users using wireless multihop connections. Our contribution consists in designing, implementing and testing a tracker-less Bit-Torrent like application adapted to wireless ad-hoc networks. The proposed architecture includes two principal components: a membership management service and a content sharing service. As classical tracker-based Bit-Torrent membership management and peer discovery are unfeasible in ad hoc networks, we design the membership management service as a distributed tracker overlay that connects peers involved in the same sharing session. Using the membership information provided by the tracker overlay, the content sharing service schedules the data transfer connections among the session members by leveraging the multihop routing feature of wireless ad-hoc networks. Our test-bed composed of PDAs and smart-phones equipped with WIFI adapters and Windows Mobile 6 operating system is used to validate the feasibility of our application and to evaluate its performance.