COMONet: Community Mobile Network

Abstract: The density of mobile phones has increased rapidly in recent years. One drawback of the current mobile telephone technology is that it forces all the calls to go through cellular base stations even if the caller and the callee are within the radio range of each other. Hybrid cellular networks and Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) have been proposed as solutions that enable mobile phone users to bypass cellular base stations. However, these technologies either require special hardware or in some cases have to rely on the service providers. We identified that most of the Commodity-off-the-Shelf mobile phones are Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth) enabled. We propose a Community Mobile Network (COMONet) which utilizes Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth) to build ad hoc network among mobile phone users to bypass GSM base stations whenever possible. COMONet does not depend on special noncommodity hardware and it is a software based solution. COMONet monitors all the available paths over the ad hoc network and it transparently switches to the regular path over the service provider's GSM base station if a path is not available over the ad hoc network. In COMONet the caller and the callee do not have to be within the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth range of each other to make a call since the COMONet is capable of routing calls through the other mobile nodes that are participating in the COMONet.