2014 IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT)
Short Paper: Seamless File Sharing for Android Devices MinSeok Jeon, Sun-Kyum Kim, Ji-Hyeun Yoon, Jinhee Jo, Sung-Bong Yang Department of Computer Science Yonsei University Seoul, Korea {zenoshock, skyum, y_chick, gurucho}@yonsei.ac.kr,
[email protected] Abstract— The performance of mobile devices, especially smart phones, has been quickly improved for the last few years. Most users take advantage of highly efficient smart phones, and consume the contents in the smart phones longer time than other devices usage time. As a result, users frequently share the contents and the needs of file sharing via smart phones have been increased considerably. Existing peer-to-peer sharing frequently incurs disconnections and retransmissions. A web hard-based sharing needs to pay expensive cost for using high-volume file servers as well. In order to overcome such problems, we propose an application for seamless file sharing for the Android devices. The seamless service manager and the file manager in the proposed application share files seamlessly by choosing faster and more stable network automatically—one of the Bluetooth and the WIFI. We expect that the proposed application could be a cost effective and reliable solution for file sharing among mobile devices.
Figure 1. The architecture of SFS on Android devices
Keywords— File sharing, Seamless, Android, Application
I. INTRODUCTIONS The performance of mobile devices, especially smart phones, has been enhanced considerably for the last few years [1]. Nowadays, a great deal of people use smart phones. Particularly, Android [2] based smart phones become more and more prevalent in the smart phone markets [3]. Most people use their smart phones longer than other devices. [4]. As a result, users frequently share contents and the needs of file sharing via smart phones have been increased. In this paper, we concern seamless file sharing on Androidbased smart phones. Most mobile file sharing is performed either on the peer-to-peer (P2P)-based systems or on the web hard-based systems. The P2P systems suffer from frequent disconnections and retransmissions due to the nature of mobility of users. The web hard-based systems are quite reliable, but users have to pay for using high-volume file servers. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a seamless file sharing (SFS) for the Android devices. SFS has the following features:
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. We introduce the architecture of SFS in Section 2, explain the application on the device in Section 3, and finish with conclusions in Section 4. II.
ARCHITECTURE (FOR IMPLEMENTATION)
The architecture of SFS should work dynamically for seamless file transfer by two managers. Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of SFS on two Android devices. It consists of the seamless service manager (SSM) and the file manager (FM). First, SSM maintains seamless file sharing. FM manages file streams and keeps track of being sent or received files. When two devices are connected, the SSM of the sender communicates with the FM and the SSM of the receiver. When a file is to be sent to the receiver, SFS selects one of wireless networks, Bluetooth or WIFI, according to which network is connected via the SSM. When the sender sends via Bluetooth, SFS finds the name of connectable devices by the Bluetooth SSID and connects through the MAC address of the receiver [5]. Meanwhile, when the sender does via WIFI, SFS uses UDP broadcast [6] that finds the devices connected to the same access point.
1) SFS uses the ad-hoc networks, Bluetooth, and WIFI.
A. Seamless Service Manager
2) SFS reconnects with an available network seamlessly when a disconnection occurs in the current network.
SSM maintains the overall process of seamless file sharing. For seamless file sharing, SSM detects connectable devices in the device list and updates the list every five seconds. Note that seamless file sharing means file sharing without any resets and any retransmissions from the beginning of the file. SSM has three ways of seamless file sharing.
3) SFS chooses a faster and more stable network automatically, if any. 4) SFS allows file transfer continuously when resuming.
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2014 IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT)
1) When a device is connected with both WIFI and Bluetooth, SSM sends a file after selecting WIFI automatically.
‘MSGBOX’ at the top of the window is to show the status of the network. The next black bar shows the current state of network. When the state is ‘FILETRANS’, SFS is now sending a file. Application include device list and file list. The list has information for device connection and file transfer, respectively.
2) When a disconnection occurs in the current network, SSM changes into an available network automatically, if any. For example, if the current connection is WIFI and a disconnection occurs, SSM switches to Bluetooth automatically. 3) When all networks are not available, SSM resends automatically, when any network is connected.
SSM uses the unique ID and the file size to check the duplication of the transferred file. The next bar is the list of files stored in the device. It displays the file information such as the file name, the transfer rate of the file which is the percentage of the file received, and the file size. The application operates as follows. First, the user selects one of the devices in the device list, and then chooses a file to send. Next, the user presses the ‘SENDFILE’ button. Then the file is sent via the selected network automatically. The receiver only sees the transfer rate. IV.
CONCLUSIONS
We present an application of SFS which is applicable to various Android devices. Our application could be a solution for frequent disconnection of P2P file sharing in mobile devices. Since SFS doesn’t use the server, there are no additional communication costs. All users need the a simple operation done by themselves. SFS will be extended to send and receive files at the same time. And it can improve the limitation of devices such as low battery or lack of capacity. We expect that our research will also be useful for related studies with regard to a variety of situations for seamless transfer. Figure 2. Operation Framework in SSM
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thus, the user just presses the “Send” button, the entire file is completely sent without any reset or retransmission.
“This research was supported by the MKE(The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea NHN. Under IT/SW Creative research program (NIPA-2012-H0505-12-1017) supervised by the NIPA(National IT Industry Promotion Agency)”. This research was also supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2013R1A1A2011114).
Figure 2 shows the operation framework in SSM. In the top portion of Figure 2, illustrates the operation of device detection. Device detection works independently of other operations. Device detection begins and is always done until finishing SFS. shows seamless management as well as file streams. Seamless management works by checking the connectable device list, the connection of devices, and accessing the transfer files information. SSM transfers a file through file streams based on the information of management.
REFERENCES [1] [2]
B. File Manager FM manages file streams and keeps track of a file to be sent or received. When a file is sent, it is divided into 8 KB-blocks. When FM receives file blocks, it saves the offsets for checking the rest file blocks, and merges the blocks to restore the entire file. To inform the sender, FM sends the current offsets of the file being sent to the sender during file sharing. The sender checks the offsets periodically and sends the file. III.
[3] [4]
[5]
[6]
APPLICATION
In this section, we display the application on SFS. SFS works on 4.0 or higher version of the Android OS. The
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