Leveraging BLE and social trust to enable mobile in situ collaborations.

ABSTRACTCollaborative computing, where co-located mobile devices collaborate to perform a large computing task has emerged as an important computing paradigm. Two key challenges in this paradigm are discovering nearby mobile devices that are willing to participate and establishing trusted connections. This paper presents a middleware layer called CoTrust that addresses these two important issues. CoTrust is comprised of a collaboration protocol for negotiation between a small group of co-located mobile devices over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It incorporates a trust model to enable collaborators to assess the trust level of a collaboration based only on their observed interactions on the social network with their peers. A prototype implementation of CoTrust on Android smartphones demonstrates its feasibility, energy efficiency as well as good performance.