With the rapidly increasing adoption of more and more powerful
wireless-enabled personal mobile devices, users are facing new
opportunities and challenges in making connections with other users in
order to share relevant information. This is especially true, given
the dynamic nature of potential interactions between typical mobile
users. Peer-to-peer applications have established themselves as a
popular and effective method for information sharing in static
environments, and our research is examining the issues involved in
peer-to-peer application deployments for dynamic mobile ad hoc
environments. The natural context of direct local proximity between
peer devices coupled with user preferences as a context for
information filtering provides a powerful mechanism for dynamic and
opportunistic information exchange. In this paper we demonstrate how
peer-to-peer protocols can be successfully implemented in a mobile ad
hoc environment, in order to enable information sharing
applications. We discuss the issues involved in the design and
implementation of mobile deployments of peer-to-peer applications, and
we illustrate these approaches in an information sharing application
for Bluetooth-enabled mobile users.