WShare: an instant secure collaboration workspace over ad hoc wireless LAN

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel file and application sharing system that enables a group of mobile stations that do not have any prior security association and infrastructure support, to form a secure collaboration workspace, and share files and application content instantly with minimal human intervention.Design/methodology/approachThe paper looks at the system implementation and experimentation.FindingsWShare can automatically establish a peer‐to‐peer network among the participating mobile stations, and provides a transparent shared file repository through which the mobile stations can securely exchange files with simple drag‐and‐drop operations. This file sharing application can also be specialized to support the same file beaming service over wireless LAN as that provided by Palm PDAs over infrared links. On the application sharing front, WShare supports a general remote execution mechanism that can synchronize the state of multiple instances of a standard productivity application, such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, across different machines. Finally for sharing generic applications, WShare also integrates virtual network computing with reliable wireless broadcast to provide a user‐interface level sharing mechanism. Performance measurement on the fully operational WShare prototype shows that a collaboration workspace among five mobile nodes can be set up within 3.5 seconds.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a new communication paradigm and presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a fully‐working prototype.