Enabling grassroots communication: a memory-aided broadcast mechanism for a community radio service on an ad-hoc device-to-device mobile network

Abstract

This paper investigates deploying a village level community radio application on an ad hoc network substrate comprising completely of basic mobile phones. We envision a system where any user in the network is equally empowered to generate and distribute audio content to the entire network, using his or her mobile phone. The paper focuses on the study of suitable broadcast algorithms for such a network. In this context we propose a novel broadcast technique called MaBA (Memoryaided Broadcast Algorithm) where nodes bank on their memory to decide whether to forward packets of an audio stream – capitalizing on their past behavior to stabilize on fixed routes for the entire stream. In our scheme called Environs Aware Broadcast Mechanism (EABA), a node gauges the local mobility around itself and uses that to decide which of two broadcast mechanisms to use. When mobility is high it uses SBA (Scalable Broadcast Algorithm), a well-known neighbor knowledge broadcast algorithm with relatively high overheads; but when mobility is low it switches to MaBA. Extensive simulations on a village level MANET confirm that EABA is successful in substantially reducing jitter, latency and packet loss: all critical metrics for an audio application. At the same time EABA does not incur other overheads and maintains the same levels of reachability and efficiency as SBA.