You’ve Got Photos! The design and evaluation of a location-based media-sharing application

PhotoJournal is a novel location-based media sharing application that enables users to build interactive journals that associate multimedia files with locations on maps and share this information with other users. Its underlying information discovery and sharing mechanism is 7DS that runs in either pure peer-to-peer or centralized server-to-client mode, depending on the availability of a server and/or an infrastructure. 7DS-enabled devices act as miniature caches, sharing information with each other. When access to an information server (e.g., web server) is not available, the local 7DS instance running on the device enables the device to search and access information from other peers in proximity. We have implemented the prototype and evaluated the delay to access the data using three testbeds. Two of these testbeds employ a centralized (server-to-client) architecture, while the third one applies the peer-to-peer paradigm. Depending on the underlying network technology and device capabilities, this delay varies. The results encourage us to perform additional empirical-based studies under increased traffic load conditions and initiate a user-study in the premises of a museum and a research park.