Mobile web for under-privileged in developing countries

In developing nations, Internet infrastructure in scarce; however, majority of people in developing countries also need access to information that matter for their daily life and livelihood. As cost of computers are higher than mobile phones and infrastructure for running computers by stable electricity is not widely available at many places of under developed and developing (hence, referred as developing) countries. One of the major options for under-privileged people in developing countries to access information is through mobile phone. A mobile device with GPRS for access to Internet services is still expensive for a common man to afford in developing countries. Therefore, to offer mobile web for the developing countries, we need to look at SMS (Short Message Service) as transport bearer, which is cheaper and can support most of the actionable services (many important services which needs a few bytes to exchange the information). SMS as transport bearer has one constraints – it does not interoperate (i.e., a user belong to one service provider is not able to access services by SMS-data of another service provider). In this paper, we propose a routing algorithm that makes SMS-data interoperable. We also propose architecture for mobile web over SMS as transport bearer for seamless application access in roaming, number portability, and vehicular condition. Substantial researches have been done on performance of TCP/IP for wireless web that mainly focused on three applications viz., file transfer, Electronic mail, and World Wide Web. This paper presents performance of actionable information through online transaction over TCP/IP and SMS under similar conditions; it shows SMS is not at a disadvantage compared to TCP/IP.