AllJoyn: free P2P framework from Qualcomm

At the Mobile World Congress, which ended yesterday, Qualcomm's Innovation Center (QuIC) presented a P2P framework, AllJoyn, that enables developers to create applications for proximity-based device-to-device communication without the use of an intermediary server. The framework allows applications to communicate directly between devices via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth without requiring a UMTS connection or Wi-Fi access point.

The new framework is designed to overcome many of the current communication barriers of P2P connections. Challenges involve, for example, transparent device and service discovery, networking and message routing, and a security framework for message authentication and encryption. The technology is platform independent and available as an open source project; implementations have become available for download for C++ and Java. Qualcomm says it hopes that the community will port the framework to other languages. Currently supported connection technologies are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, various other types of connection are reportedly conceivable for the future.

Qualcomm has already demonstrated that AllJoyn can be ported to Windows, Android, Linux and Maemo. While the MWC presentation focussed on the Android platform, Qualcomm has announced that it also intends to port the framework to its custom Brew MP OS platform for feature phones. The idea behind AllJoyn is to create a simple way for all kinds of devices to communicate with each other. Potential areas of use for AllJoyn include peer-to-peer gaming, secure file sharing between devices, extended functionality for set-top boxes, photo sharing and in-car infotainment.

AllJoyn is made available under the terms of the Apache 2.0 licence.

(ehe)