Enabling pervasive mobile applications with the FM radio broadcast data system

Many existing electronic devices lack data connectivity but carry an FM radio receiver. Such devices include media players, vehicular audio systems, low-end mobile phones, and mobile phones whose owners cannot afford data plans. We observe that the highly available FM radio data system (RDS) provides a low-rate digital broadcast channel that is specific to the radio station an FM receiver tunes to. While RDS is mainly intended for delivering simple information about the station and current program, we argue that it can be employed to enable a broad range of new applications and enhance existing ones. In this position paper, we discuss a number of applications that can be enabled or enhanced by RDS, and analyze the challenges evolved. We then present RDS-Link, a protocol to efficiently transfer broadcast data over RDS, and characterize its performance under real-life settings.