Secure and reliable data communication in developing regions and rural areas

Nowadays, despite the ever increasing need of people for staying "connected" at any time and everywhere, in many areas of the world data connection is extremely expensive or even absent. The Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) network virtually covers all the populated areas of the world and on average, the entire world population have a handheld device capable of accessing at least the GSM services. Therefore, it makes sense to consider the Short Message Service (SMS) as the most popular wireless data service for such devices. In this work, we exploit the SMS as mechanism for data transfer, especially in scenarios where there is no other network coverage than GSM, such as in rural areas and developing regions. In particular, we propose a framework, based on the SMS as transport facility, which enables secure end-to-end data communication in a ubiquitous and pervasive manner. Moreover, we investigated how, by using compression techniques, the overall processing and transmission efforts needed for secure data communication can be effectively reduced, with the obvious consequences also in terms of energy consumption on the involved devices. Finally, we successfully tested the effectiveness of the proposed framework within the context of a proof of concept implementation.