Real-world cross-platform decentralized asynchronous peer-to-peer communication

Question

My knowledge about network programming is limited, so, all the comments are more than welcome. Essentially my question boils down to the following question:

Q1. Is there really such a thing as decentralized asynchronous cross-platform peer-to-peer communication?

Let me explain myself.

• If we have two http servers running on computers with actual IP addresses, then clearly the answer is yes, assuming one writes a protocol for the interaction.

• To go one step further, if one of them (or both) is (are) behind a router, then, with port forwarding the communication can still be established. However, here the problems start because if someone wants to run such a server on the background, say in a mobile phone, the app that is relying on this server really works when one is at home (we can not really expect to request port forwarding everywhere we go).

• But even beyond that,

• Q2. do mobile phones obtain an actual IP address from telecommunication companies when someone is not using a wi-fi?

• If this is true, then clearly one can have cross-platform asynchronous peer-to-peer communication at the expense of not using wi-fi by running an http server on a smartphone. (I understand that this is not convenient, but it is certainly doable.)

Concluding, the two (perhaps there are more) relevant questions that I can think of are:

• Q3. How does Skype really work?
• Q4. How does Viber really work?

Based on the answer for Skype, it says: If one of the callee or both of them do not have a public IP, then they send voice traffic to another online Skype node over UDP or TCP. So, it appears that there is no direct communication in Skype, because they have to use a man-in-the-middle for such a scenario.

Regarding Viber, I could not find a good-thorough answer to this particular question. Do people talk to each other through a Viber centralized server, or, do they establish a direct connection? Of course if they do establish a direct connection, then I really want to know how they manage such a thing since a mobile phone may or may not have a physical address. How is a Viber message routed to my cell phone from a friend of mine even when Viber is not running and I am behind a router?

I guess the answer to Viber is really push notifications, but as far as I can understand, all the variations of push notifications rely on open connections, and then the servers of the applications send the notifications to the clients through such connection(s). So, this approach gives us the feeling that it is asynchronous, but essentially it is not. We are cheating, in the sense that there is a constantly open connection to a server, and moreover, as far as I can understand, the application server has to push the notification through that server. Schematically:

A > Central App Server > Central Server w/ open connection to my cellphone > me

So, this seems to be once again a centralized approach.

Honestly, the only approach that I can think of that is both decentralized and asynchronous (on mobile phones as well) is to run an http server on every platform/device, but this comes at the expense of not using Wi-Fi and assuming that a telecommunication company really assigns a physical IP address to every mobile phone (which I do not know if it is true, do you?).

What about WASTE, darknets, F2Fs, etc? Do they offer advantages in the sense of a more direct asynchronous communication between some interested parties? Are there real-world applications (also including mobile phones) using such approaches for communication.

Really, this is not the actual problem that I would like to work on, but I would like to know what the state of the art is so that I can figure out how I can proceed from there. So, all comments are really more than welcome. If you have references for the state of the art I would like to know about them as well, but a brief description would also be nice.

I appreciate all your time and effort in advance.

Answer 1

You asked many questions, here is the beginning of the answers:

Q1: Yes. For example, take BitTorrent's very successful 10 million+ node network. Aside from the bootstrapping process, the protocol is entirely decentralized and asynchronous. See here for more info.

Q2: Yes! Go to www.whatismyip.com on your mobile telephone, and you will see your assigned IP. However, you are likely to be very filtered (e.g: incoming traffic on port 80 is likely to be blocked).

Q3: It has elements of P2P and clever tricks to get around NAT issues - see here for more info.

Q4: I don't know.