Thesis Proposal: Fundamental Communication Abstractions for Building Proximity-Based Mobile Applications

In this research, we study the requirements of proximity-based mobile applications and we design the funda- mental building blocks for these applications. Our motivation lies in the fact that traditional communication abstractions, typically broadcast primitives with strong consistency guarantees, do not adequately capture the spatio-temporal semantics of proximity-based mobile applications. Rather, developers need communi- cation abstractions that are defined for a certain range and a certain time duration. While designing these new communication abstractions, we also consider the user privacy concerns raised by using proximity-based mobile applications.