Introduction:

Walkie-Talkie applications have demonstrated significant usage during calamities and remote or rural developments. They became notably popular after hurricanes wreaked havoc on the east coast of the United States. They have features like Push-to-talk that make them ideal for point-to-point communication. While the messenger applications, including WhatsApp work best when there is uninterrupted and high bandwidth connectivity, these applications perform better even in poor network connectivity. Applications like Zello have reached an audience of over 150 million users worldwide. Users especially the elderly have found it easy to use and like the radio calls used to request help and rescue in mission critical operations.

Many walkie-talkie applications have saturated the market when there is a mobile network or Wi-Fi connectivity and can reach the end user based on some lookup of the end-user in a centralized directory. However, they hold immense promise for two-party direct communications even in the absence of a 2G or Wi-Fi network if the radio communications can be extended over device-to-device networks such as Bluetooth.

The appeal of radio like communication over Bluetooth is that it can work on cell phones and independent of geography or network. Establishing network connectivity over two phones with such an application installed requires only the pairing of the Bluetooth devices. Since there is no external network or line of sight involved, the utility expands to climbers on a mountain or offshore activities with no loss of fidelity and extends to a wide variety of handheld smartphones.

Less than 1% of the walkie-talkie applications have made this offering simply because they rely on an IP connectivity and a third-party IP provider. The Bluetooth stack-based communication eliminates the need for a third party. Since it requires a separate stack from those for the Wi-Fi based ones, these applications have yet to tap into these expanded possibilities.

When this is enabled, it can help even virtualize the communication regardless of whether it occurs between the devices or between the networks. This becomes a driver for seamless communication which was not possible until now. In such a case, the users can look forward to making this communication during both outages and normal operations.

The Push-To-Talk feature and the ability to send Morse codes have already been perfected by the existing applications so that the user interface remains the big button to send the voice transmission. Even the Bluetooth pairing is well established by both the Android and IPhone operating systems and all that is required from these applications, is the ability for the user interface to dedicate a communication between the two points.

The Bluetooth drivers for the application enables the pairing to be completed and to allow the transmission for the duration of the send. They provide a convenience over the existing pairing by being stateful when necessary. The endpoints can be private ip addresses to enable the rest of the communication platform and mode of operation to be independent of the connectivity involved.