Mobile VOIP Over an AdHoc WiFi Network

Australian researchers have managed to create a mobile VOIP network out of nothing more than a group of wifi-phones. No towers or server needed.

They mainly envision this technology as being useful in the wilderness where no phone towers exist, or in emergency situations where a disaster has destroyed the local phone network. It works by daisy-chaining together a series of wifi-capable devices through an adhoc wifi network. The phones themselves then decide how to route information from one phone to the next without the need to bounce a signal back to a central server for routing.

Range is limited to wifi-distances between nodes, but nodes can be anything – wifi access points or other stationary devices, or mobile phones with wifi capability.