COMONet: Community Mobile Network

Abstract

The density of mobile phones has increased rapidly in recent years and this phenomenon is not limited to the developed countries; in some third world countries the mobile networks expand in much higher rate than in developed countries. One drawback of the current mobile telephone technology is that it forces all the calls to go through the base station even if the caller and the callee are within the radio range of each other. Hybrid cellular networks and Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) have been proposed as solutions that enable mobile phone users to bypass the base stations. However, these technologies either require special hardware or in some cases have to rely on the service providers. We note that more and more Commodity-o -the-Shelf (COTS) mobile phones are WiFi and Bluetooth enabled. We propose a Community Mobile Network (COMONet) that utilises WiFi and Bluetooth to establish ad hoc networks to enable mobile phone users to bypass the base station whenever possible. COMONet ; COmmunity MObile Network, is a P2P mobile network. As its name suggests what we are trying to achieve is to create a community of mobile users to facilitate voice calls between two parties. As long as both caller and callee are in the community there is no need of a base station. In very broad terms, when a person dials a number COMONet searches whether the dialed mobile phone number is within the reach via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. If the search turns out to be positive the call will be routed via the path in which the intended party was found else it will be sent via the mobile service provider. When a call is made through a mobile phone, if the parties are not stationery, it is possible to loose the connection. As a countermeasure there is a continuous process to monitor the status of the connection currently being used and to check for the other alternatives. If a better path than the current path is found, call will be switched to the new path without breaking the call. This switching can happen in either direction from WiFi(or Bluetooth) to cellular and from cellular to WiFi(or Bluetooth).