WIRELESS NETWORK ARCHITECTURE USING SOUND FOR UBIQUITOUS SIGNAL TRANSMISSION Kuruvilla Mathew Faculty of IT and Computer Science, University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Kuching, Malaysia kuruvilla.mathew.k@ieee.org Biju Issac School of Computing Teesside University Middlesbrough, Tees Valley, UK bissac@ieee.org Tan Chong Eng Faculty of IT and Computer Science, University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Kuching, Malaysia cetan@ieee.org Abstract — The digital divide between urban and rural areas is now attracting active research. There are a host of reasons for this divide and this paper presents the work in progress about one proposed solution to a major technical problem causing this. It has been noted that the high frequency WiFi and similar signals are not well suited for the wilderness type of environment with dense foliage. Additionally, such terrains also impose stringent restriction on computational and electric power as well as in cost. This calls forth the need for a new type of signal that can work efficiently in such environments and a low cost, low bandwidth, low frequency signal that can possibly work is identified in the form of Sound. This paper presents a new network architecture that is designed to work with the low frequency, ubiquitous signals such as sound. The architecture can work in peer-to-peer ad-hoc networks mode, infrastructure mode, broadcast mode (for remote telemetry) etc. using wideband multi-channel transmission. However, since the proposed architecture uses low frequency signal, it is expected to deliver low throughput as well. Using an ubiquitous signal such as sound makes the entire process very cost effective as it eliminates the need of expensive transceivers. Keywords—network architecture; low frequency transmission; wireless communication; I. INTRODUCTION There is an ever growing technological divide between the urban and rural technological framework. We see the urban front growing in leaps and bounds, fuelled by the large economic resources and wide user base, resulting in improvements in speed, reliability and cost. The rural environment does not have these financial resources, and with some added technological limitations that makes it almost impossible to adopt the urban technologies leaves this front struggling to establish basic minimal connectivity. This divide is not conductive for total economic and social development and progress of the world at large and therefore research in this front is of paramount importance. The terrain and sparse user base of the jungle type of environment makes it extremely ineffective to set up wired infrastructure for network connectivity and hence the better option in terms of cost effectiveness and reach is using wireless. However, the dense growth of bushes drastically reduces the range of high frequency RF signals used by WiFi, 3G etc. These are also high energy signals, greatly depreciating the usability as the terrains pose serious limitations to the rages of these signals. It is therefore desirous to have a low energy, low frequency, ubiquitous signal. Sound is a good candidate for such requirements, given its ubiquitous presence, low energy and low frequency, allowing it to traverse very well over obstacles. However, the ubiquity of sound also leaves us open to handle a lot of “noise” as well. The previous studies have analyzed and proven that sound can be used as a carrier signal for wireless data communication [1], studied the noise profiles in various environment to gather idea on efficient signal-to-noise ratios and to aid identification of appropriate channels for communication [2], and a survey to identify sound perception of various frequencies by humans so that the channel used for data transmission causes minimal intrusion to the environment of use [3]. This paper furthers with the architecture for a model designed for the purpose. The ensuing sections of the paper is organized as related works, the proposed signal (sound), the design, its philosophy and application and conclusion and future Works. II. RELATED WORKS Use of sound as carrier for low bandwidth, low power communication in the ubiquitous paradigm is discussed in [1]. This paper attempted ubiquitous data communication using existing hardware in smart devices and sound as the signal. Successful data transfer was achieved and future work on furthering this towards practical application was suggested. Mathew et al. presented ambient noise analysis on sound for use in wireless digital transmission [2], in which they discuss the analysis of ambient noise in various environments in order to look for a quieter channel for data transmission and also to look for an appropriate signal-to-noise ratio. Mathew et al. discussed evaluation of sound perception to identify candidate IEEE - 33044 5th ICCCNT - 2014 July 11 - 13, 2014, Hefei, China