Wireless network architecture using sound for ubiquitous signal transmission

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.