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Community radio service now on your mobile phone
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 24 May 2011, 23:13 IST
Bangalore: Have you ever heard that a mobile phone can be used as community radio? In today's world nobody can think of their life without a mobile phone. Mobile phones are playing a vital role as well as it has become a mini computer. Well, now mobile phone can be used as a community radio too. Professor Kavitha Ranganathan and Professor Ankur Sarin, faculty members at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) has proposed to use mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to start community radio service where each community member can air their own programmes, reports Daily Bhaskar.
The software MANETS are usually used in areas like disaster recovery or military operations. This is also used for groups of mobile devices without any centralized administration or control which form an ad hoc network among themselves. The two professors proposed in their papers, titled "A Voice for the Voiceless: Peer-to-peer Mobile Phone Networks for a Community Radio Service' , a decentralized community station in which users will be required to buy a basic low-end mobile phone preloaded with the MANET software.
Without any centralized administration or control also MANET can be used. According to the paper if there are enough users, the phone will automatically form an exclusive network among them enabling users to talk to one another and exchange other forms of data. As it is decentralized every community member is equally equipped to air their content on the radio service, without a central authority choosing or filtering the content. The paper suggests a weekly in-person meeting of the community members to decide which user will be allowed to broadcast at what time, where all users interested in an airslot can participate.