Communication Support for Mobile Virtual Groups

With the increasing availability of wireless networks with different bandwidths, communication between mobile users plays a more and more important role. Today, voice communication between two users over mobile phones is the dominant application, but soon, multimedia group applications will likely get a good share of the market. The possibility to dynamically create and destroy mobile virtual groups will make a wealth of new applications possible. One of these applications, which we consider here, is the communication between a group of tourists (for instance, a family visiting a city), whose members are logically related, but who are located at different physical places. For this scenario, we have developed, in the framework of the DeepMap project, the group communication application LocaPhone, which allows the single members of a group to use one mobile device at the same time as an electronic tourist guide, a mobile (IP) phone, and an instrument for navigation and location detection. In this paper, we describe the design considerations behind this application and its implementation. We focus on the two components for voice communication and for location detection.