AiTF: Collaborative Research: Algorithms for Smartphone Peer-to-Peer Networks

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The growing ubiquity of smartphones, combined with the rapid improvement of operating system support for direct wireless communication between nearby devices, creates a compelling opportunity for the emergence of easy to deploy and widely used smartphone peer-to-peer applications. There are several use cases for such applications. For example, in many user environments, cellular data minutes are bought in small blocks and carefully conserved by users, generating an interest in networking operations that can avoid infrastructure. In addition, smartphone peer-to-peer networks can bring connectivity to settings such as disaster zones, festivals, or wilderness where traditional cellular and WiFi coverage is compromised, overwhelmed, or non-existent. This project aims to develop network algorithms and tools that simplify the design of useful distributed systems on top of local peer-to-peer connections. The project has the potential for significant societal impact by enabling compelling new applications for smartphone peer-to-peer networks. The project is also expected to have significant educational impact. The project focuses on designing and analyzing provably correct and efficient network computation algorithms that can run on top of existing smartphone peer-to-peer services, and simplify the design of peer-to-peer systems that can be deployed on existing smartphone hardware. The project consists of two major research directions. The first research direction is experimental in nature. It will study and evaluate peer-to-peer services available in commodity smartphone operating systems and define a small number of validated abstractions that capture their capabilities and behavior. The second research direction is theoretical in nature. It will describe and analyze solutions to well-motivated network computation primitives using these abstractions. The problems studied will include consensus, leader election, rumor spreading, gossip and function computation. The project will seek both provably correct and efficient algorithms as well as lower bounds that establish fundamental limits for useful computation in this setting.