Short Messaging and Common Alerting Protocol over HF Spectrum

Amateur radio operators have played a major role during disasters in providing front line communication when all other technologies have seized to operate. MARTS - Malaysia Amateur Radio Transmitter's Society was in full force sharing their experiences and demonstrating the equipment at the ITU Asia-Pacific Centers of Excellence Training Workshop on Effective Use of Telecommunication/ICT in response to disasters: saving lives. The equipment range from vehicle mounted, hand helds, and nomadic units that work over UHF/VHF/HF frequencies. I had the privilege of presenting the Common Alerting Protocol experience in Sri Lanka to the government delegates from Asia and the Pacific Islands; CAP was unheard of by the delegates.

Another novel project on the use of HF spectrum for communicating short messages (or chat messages) was presented by Prof. Dr. Ahmad Zuri bin Sha'ameri at the same ITU event. It was definitely a product that could be engulfed in to the Sahana suite of Messaging gateways or part of the P2P CAP Broker. Both him and I got off to a good start on agreeing to proceed with the experimental idea of porting his solution on to Sahana. An initial document of the concept and action plan was exchanged within a few days of us returning to our desks.

Most of the officials attending the ITU event were officials from their respective telecom regulatory bodies working on disaster management. They were quite excited of the project we have put on the table and promised to educate their ministers of the possibility of piloting the HF spectrum text messaging modules for emergency communication in their countries.

The first step is to develop the software and prove the concept in Malaysia and/or Sri Lanka. This portion of the project is being funded by the Malaysia Communication and Multimedia Commission. Second step is to write a larger proposal to pilot the working solution in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and few of the Pacific Islands - Nauru, Marshal Islands, Vanuatu, etc.

Optimally transporting XML through SMS for CAP Messages - How can it be done?

While working on my presentation titled "Common Alerting Protocol" (CAP) for the ITU Workshop in Kedha, Malaysia and experimenting with the Sahana Messaging/Alerting Module in preperation for a demo for the workshop participants, I questioned, "is there a method already in place or how does one optimally send an XML file through the SMS transport. Of cause this is in relation to transporting a CAP message with the underlying XML data storage and transfer standard through the SMS transport technology.

One would say, "why bother with SMS just transport it through GPRS or any other advanced mobile data service platform transport layer. There are advantages that SMS offers and GPRS does not; a key advantage being SMS is always ready to receive messages (i.e. data can be pushed on to) provided the handset is turned on; where as GPRS must be user initiated where the data must be pulled. For the purpose of "alerting" SMS surpasses GPRS with the mentioned advantage. It is also possible to house a an applet that resides on the handset and uses GPRS to periodically fetch newly posted WAP alerts.


Obviousely all one needs to do is insert the XML formatted text including the tags, header, etc in an SMS text and send it to whomever they want. The dilemma is in the payload. The XML formated text in the image above has 520 characters with white space and 421 characters without white space. The 520 characters would fit in to four 8-bit encoded SMS pages. Cost of an SMS is proportional to the number of SMS pages; unlike GPRS which is billed by the number of bytes (or kilobytes). More so, the intent of CAP being mass alerting efficiency is compromized with the size of the payload. Hence the key question is "how do we minimize the payload of a CAP message transported througg SMS to maximize the efficiency and the effectiveness?"

For a targeted application such as one that would display a CAP message could be designed to include only the necessary and sufficient (tags), which are yet to be determined by experts and remain an open problem. Let us assume the CAP SMS text carries the <incident>, <scope>, <status>, <msgType>, <category>, <event>, <urgency>, <severity>, <certainty>, <areaDesc>, and <resourceDesc> tags. The mobile phone application would be designed to read these tags and display on an interactive mobile phone GUI. The GUI would give the recipient the option to change the predefined values such as the <msgType> from the received value of "Alert" to "Ack" and reply to the sender. Assuming the alert was issued through a software such as the Sahana Messaging Module, which has a feature to store replies and produce a consolidated report, sender could match those who had received and acknowledged the alert.

I anticipate the need to transfer XML files on to mobile phones will become a must with standardization and interoperability. The revers or the dual exists; thus XML encoding for SMS. Any one interested can find technical literature on IBM's developer works Tips.

Mobile platform revenue share model for citizen journalism in Sri Lanka

The research question is "can the mobile service platform revenue sharing model be catalyst to advocating a sustainable citizen journalism program in Sri Lanka?". The previous article on "audio content production and deliver is the first step to instigating citizen journalism" talked about the Sarvodaya initiative to build capacity in rural Sri Lanka for enabling a platform to hear the voices of the rural communities. Given the cost of mobilizing such an endeavor it is best to begin with audio productions.

I'm writing a research proposal that aims to use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with touch tone and voice through a normal phone call and Podcasts through a website (specifically WAP enabled) over the GSM mobile service platform. IVR would work over the voice channel but the dilemma lies in the Podcasts over GPRS. Given the coverage strengths in Sri Lanka it is debatable whether the Podcasts would work.

As in most cases the emphasis in applied research (or action research), besides answering the system robustness question, is answering the sustainability question. As a result it is hypothesised that a revenue share scheme would advocate for such system to live long. The revenue share model over the content business value chains (Joader, 2007) establishes a proportionate sharing scheme between the content-creators, content-owners, aggregators, vendors, and the network-providers.

There are already aggregators such as Kongregate, Youtube, Digital Journal, etc that provide platforms for content-creators to cash in for their creativity. In Sri Lanka the mobile operators are apprehensive to sharing revenue with service providers. The research intends to partner with a mobile operator such as Dialog Telekom who has the largest mobile market share in Sri Lanka and is investigating ventures that will use their technologies such as delivery of the news paper Lankapuvath over SMS and IVR.

The research design will look at a sample of 10 governing districts in Sri Lanka and through a series of awareness campaigns recruit content-creators and subscribers. Thereafter, let the system determine the survival of the fittest; where the creative, interesting, subscriber centric content-creators will profit from the system and the weaker ones will disappear. The assessment will group the data on the urban/rural divide, language, religious preface, and gender. The publications will be categorized in to current affairs, culture, philosophy, education, and entertainment based on a probability measure distribution; where a publication on the topic of "child primary schooling" may fall into the categories of current affairs and education with a distribution of 0.70 and 0.30, respectively. Both a subjective and objective assessment schemes will be implement to qualitatively and qualitatively assess the evidence of the viability of the technology, human aspects, and policy implications.

Comments are welcome on any literature available in this area, research methodologies, and implementation schemes or even knowledge on other projects of similar nature.