*Now, community radio service on your mobiles!* Source: Niyati Rana, DNA, 23.5.11
Ahmedabad: How does the idea of operating a community radio station with mobile phones sound? Listening to informative programmes, 'airing' advertisements and filtering content generated by community members — all this could be done using simple cellphones! The unconventional method of operating a community radio station using a new application, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), is proposed by Prof Kavitha Ranganathan and Prof Ankur Sarin, faculty members at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA). MANETS are conventionally used in areas like disaster recovery or military operations. In a working paper titled "A Voice for the Voiceless: Peer-to-peer Mobile Phone Networks for a Community Radio Service", Ranganathan and Sarin propose a decentralised community station in which users will be required to buy a basic low-end mobile phone preloaded with the MANET software. The software is used for groups of mobile devices without any centralised administration or control which form an ad hoc network among themselves. The paper states that if there are enough such users, the phone will automatically form an exclusive network among them enabling users to talk to one another and exchange other forms of data. The system the paper proposes is built around the idea of community participation which is the essence of community media. The paper argues that it found two schemes particularly promising for the application: Dynamic-Prob and SBA-Adaptive. "We envision a true peer service where any participant of the peer-topeer network can be a source of audio content. This entails each phone in the network to broadcast reliable and efficient voice-based data packets to every other node in the network," states the paper. The idea of the MANET based community radio channel is to be completely decentralised. Every community member is equally equipped to air their content on the radio service, without a central authority choosing or filtering the content. To decide which user will be allowed to broadcast at what time, the paper proposes a weekly in-person meeting of the community members where all users interested in an airslot can participate. "A weekly schedule can be drawn up in a democratic fashion, a simple table of node identities (phone numbers), start times and end times. This table can then be confidentially broadcast to all nodes and stored in each peer phone's memory. When a user tries to broadcast content, it is only forwarded to other nodes if the schedule permits it," states the paper. To filter content during broadcast, the paper suggests use of a decentralised reputation based scheme where users can keep track of past performance of their peers and regulate participation depending on their reputation. http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/GUJ-AHD-now-community-radio-service-on-your-mobiles-2126968.html
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