Texting during a football game seems trivial. However, the high volume of messages sent by 90,000+ fans causes latency in local towers that makes texting impractical. This latency frustrated our team at the Rose Bowl last year--some of our texts didn't send until we had exited the stadium altogether! With our hack, we sought to improve the current network infrastructure to support the high volume of messages.
Our hack establishes a mesh network of smart phones to communicate without data. Using the Multipeer Connectivity Framework provided by Apple smartphones, we route content from a sender to a recipient by routing their messages through intermediary members of the network. Although Bluetooth provides only effective communication between devices within 25 feet of each other, our chaining technique allows two devices to communicate from much further away--say, perhaps, from one end of the stadium to the other.
The low cost of routing a message through an intermediary member of the network (50 ms) suggests that our approach would scale well for a large number of users. By encrypting the message, we support personal messages, unlike similar apps that broadcast the message to the entire network.
We are excited to share our technology at TreeHacks!
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