Efficient Broadcasting for a Mobile Ad-hoc Network based Peer-to-peer Community Radio Service

Ad-hoc networks consisting entirely of simple mobile phones can be used to deploy village level telephony. We investigate a novel application for such networks – a peer-to peer community radio service. 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. This study concentrates on a critical aspect of this service – the choice of the network-wide broadcast protocol. Using extensive simulations, we evaluate the suitability of various broadcast techniques for a rural peer-to-peer mobile adhoc network. Our simulations identify the best choice of protocols under various village network conditions while simultaneously identifying limitations of the current protocols.