DevCom: Device communities for user-friendly and trustworthy communication, sharing, and collaboration

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of DevCom, a network system that provides users with a trustworthy and user-friendly way to communicate, share and collaborate among distinct groups of devices simultaneously, e.g., home devices, work devices and friends’ devices. DevCom is trustworthy, because reliability, security and privacy issues are automatically taken care of with state-of-the-art cryptography. User-friendliness is ensured through self-configuration, persistent connections in advent of mobility, and by automatically solving problems that network address translation (NAT) and firewalls introduce. An experimental evaluation shows that (1) off-the-shelf applications such as games perform in the same way as they do without DevCom, (2) latency, throughput and processing overhead is low and unnoticeable to users, and (3) persistent connections are automatically supported on devices with changing addresses. A critical analysis from three user perspectives, i.e., a novice, an intermediate user, and an application developer, highlight the user-friendliness of DevCom for a broad range of users.