An approach for peer-to-peer collaboration between mobile devices using Web-based technologies: Master's thesis

Communication and collaboration is often independent of time and place. Thus, the collaboration tools should also be available when the users are moving around. The mobile devices have a key role in aggregating information while people are on the go. Therefore it would be beneficial to use that potential also for sharing information collaboratively. In this thesis, one possible solution to this challenge is given. This work provides the theoretical and technical background for mobile peer-to-peer collaboration, by combining and merging results from research on mobile collaboration and collaborative Web services. Moreover, requirements are gathered from these background studies in order to define the scope for this work. In this thesis the main objective has been to design architecture for mobile collaborative work as well as to implement a prototype system to evaluate the design. Existing technologies were used whenever possible. The proposed solution integrates a lightweight Web Service Architecture and a mobile device equipped with a standard Web server in order to enable a mobile collaborative sharing of information. In addition to the design and implementation, a background survey and a user study has been conducted to evaluate the approach from the user’s perspective. The goal was to gain insight for the whole concept as well as to evaluate the architecture and the usability of the proposed client applications. From these evaluations it seems that the approach for mobile collaboration is feasible and usable on the basis of the results. This gives a sound background for future investigations and innovations build on top of this approach.