Enabling Pervasive Mobile Applications with the FM Radio Broadcast Data System Ahmad Rahmati1, Lin Zhong1, Venu Vasudevan2, Jehan Wickramasuriya2, Daniel Stewart3 1Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering 2Motorola Labs 3Qualcomm, Inc. Rice University 1301 E.Algonquin Road 8041 Arco Corporate Drive Houston, TX Schaumburg, IL Raleigh, NC {rahmati, lzhong}@rice.edu {venu.vasudevan, jehan}@motorola.com
[email protected] ABSTRACT mobile services and enhance existing ones. The new services may Many existing electronic devices lack data connectivity but carry be supplemental or independent from the broadcasted FM radio an FM radio receiver. Such devices include media players, program. Supplemental content could enhance the FM radio vehicular audio systems, low-end mobile phones, and mobile program by broadcasting program or station-specific data, e.g. phones whose owners cannot afford data plans. We observe that lyrics, program guides, and small images. Such supplemental the highly available FM radio data system (RDS) provides a low- content can further enable on-line social networking to promote rate digital broadcast channel that is specific to the radio station an listener experience and loyalty. Independent content may be data FM receiver tunes to. While RDS is mainly intended for delivering services, e.g. news, weather, traffic, job postings, or large scale simple information about the station and current program, we queries, e.g. polls or participatory sensing. argue that it can be employed to enable a broad range of new Yet, we identify three categories of challenges regarding realizing applications and enhance existing ones. In this position paper, we the RDS-based applications above. First, network challenges: the discuss a number of applications that can be enabled or enhanced transmission of data over RDS and characterizing the reliability, by RDS, and analyze the challenges evolved.