A Voice For The Voiceless: Peer-To-Peer Mobile Phone Networks For A Community Radio Service

We propose a new application for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) - community radio. We argue how MANETS help overcome important limitations in how community radio is currently operationalized. We identify critical design elements for a MANET based community radio service and propose a broad architecture for the same. We then investigate a most critical issue - the choice of the network wide broadcast protocol for the audio content. We identify desired characteristics of a community radio broadcasting service. We choose and evaluate eight popular broadcasting protocols on these characteristics, to find the protocols most suited for our application.