Friend-to-friend short message service with opportunistic Wi-Fi beacons

This study introduces Oppline, an ad hoc opportunistic short message service that can be collaboratively used by everyone who has a smart mobile device. The data exchange method of Oppline is built on top of the universal Wi-Fi standard, thus expedites platform-independent integration of related mobile applications for delay-tolerant communications in public space. Even in highly-dense mobile networks of smart portable devices, Oppline gains performance from people's participation according to our experimental analysis validated with a real-life deployment. Without creating any network overhead, Oppline performs multi-hop message transmissions via short messages encoded in and decoded from Wi-Fi's service set identifier field. As a ubiquitous alternative to the situated communication systems, Oppline provides high versatility and usability for mobile ad hoc applications based on friend-to-friend messaging and data dissemination.