Design and Implementation of Ad Hoc Communication and Applications on Mobile Phone Terminals

Recent advancements in wireless communication technologies have attracted ad-hoc networking, which enables mobile users to communicate with each other without any infrastructure. While many ad-hoc routing protocols have been proposed, ad-hoc communication and its applications are not widespread. To expedite the widespread use of ad-hoc communications, we turn our attention to the handiest wireless device, namely, a mobile phone terminal. More mobile phones have been equipped with short distance wireless interfaces such as wireless LAN and Bluetooth. When ad-hoc communication is realized on such mobile phones with these wireless interfaces, ad-hoc communications will be available almost anytime and anywhere, which we believe will become a driving force for ad-hoc networking technology. On the other hand, while the performance of mobile phones has improved greatly over the past several years, their resources are still limited compared to laptop PCs. Therefore, to realize ad-hoc communication in mobile phones, this limitation should be considered. In this paper, we first set the design principles for mobile ad-hoc communications based on the assumed use cases and implement ad-hoc networking protocols as well as their applications on mobile phone terminals to verify their effectiveness. Through the performance evaluations, we discuss performance characteristics and potential application areas.