Towards a persistent publish/subscribe system for networks of mobile devices

There is a clear trend and progressive interest in the quasi-real-time sharing of user-generated content, and mobile devices are among the main sources for such content. Although the portability and increasing capabilities of mobile devices allow their use in a wide range of activities, the common use of centralized services to support the sharing of data between users requires highly responsive services and places a huge burden on the network, fully occupying its bandwidth with the outgoing and incoming of data that (often) could be shared directly from device to device at the network edge. Thyme is a data persistent publish/subscribe system that provides for the dissemination and storage of data in networks of mobile devices, without requiring access to the Internet nor to centralized networking services. In this paper, we apply Thyme to real-world networks of Android devices, and use it in the development of a photo sharing application. The experimental results show adequate response times for interactive usage, and low energy consumption, allowing the application to be used in a variety of (social) events without excessive battery drainage.