An Efficient Protocol for Reliable Data Communication on Dataless Devices

Abstract

Nowadays the Short Message Service (SMS) is virtually worldwide available, since almost all mobile phones, regardless of their supported features and cellular operators, are able to use such service. However, the SMS is not natively designed to exchange medium/large-sized amount of data and it has been shown that such facility is highly unreliable, especially when some particular conditions occur. In this work, we propose an efficient protocol which allows to emulate a reliable data channel on data less devices, by using the SMS as underlying communication facility. Such protocol overcomes the issues arising from the structure and the functioning of that facility, when it has to send/receive significant amount of data. The approach we propose enables to transfer a variable-sized amount of data through SMS messages, with the main aim of ensuring the reliability of communication as well as of minimizing other factors, such as the number of SMS messages sent and the energy required to perform such tasks. These characteristics make the protocol we propose suitable for data communication when the only network coverage available is the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and consequently, the SMS is the only facility to exploit. In addition, we address both the constraints arising from the limited energy budget of mobile devices and the security issues emerging in this context.