/ipos

IP over SMS- leveraging SMS to provide IP connectivity

Primary LanguagePython

IPOS -> IP over SMS

A client/server architecture to send/receive IP traffic over SMS.

Problem

Many service providers provide "Unlimited" text messages. Having access to data (mobile broadband) typically is a separate feature.

In fact many places only have access to GSM (2G).

The ability to provide IP over SMS would provide IP to users that otherwise don't have it, or where the cost is very high.

For the purposes of document, we will refer to SMS as specified in RFC 5724: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5724.txt

Overview

  1. First we need a IP to SMS encoder.

  2. Second, we need a broker, i.e. a computer with access to the network.

  3. The client phone, should either have: 1) a special browser that explicity sends SMS, or 2) a custom firmware that can intercept outgoing packets. In the first case, the browser could just wrap HTTP requests in SMS. In the second case, we would need to intercept all IP datagrams originating from the browser and wrap those in SMS.

Broker, should strip images, advertisments, and other unncessary content

Architecture

  1. User makes an HTTP request through the browser.

  2. The browser wraps the HTTP traffic in SMS and sends it to the broker.

3)The broker makes the request.

4)The broker receives the response.

5)The broker parses the response and and removes any non-text, and unncessary elements.

6)The broker passes the response to the requester.

7)The user agent displays the results.

Challenges

Bandwidth available over SMS

Extensions

Use that peer to peer distributed storing service, and create a NDN for content.

Encode images as strings -> will eat a lot of bandwidth.

References

HTTP http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.txt