Waldir Moreira, Ronedo Ferreira, Douglas Cirqueira, Paulo Mendes and Eduardo Cerqueiracerqueira@ufpa.br

September 30th, 2013ACM MobiCom Workshop on Lowest Cost Denominator Networking for Universal Access (LCDNet 2013)

Miami, USA

SocialDTN: a DTN Implementation for Digital and Social Inclusion

Agenda• Introduction

•Goal

• Scenario

• Existing Implementations

• SocialDTN Architecture

• First Experiments

• Future Steps

Introduction• Nowadays, people still suffer with digital divide and social exclusion

• Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking can mitigate such effects by means of opportunistic and asynchronous communication

• SocialDTN, an Android implementation of the DTN architecture

Goal•Mitigate the effects of digital divide and social exclusion in the riverside communities

Scenario

• Characteristics– Mobile nodes– Disruptive and intermittent links– Low node density

• Requirements– Exploit social proximity and interactions

between users through Bluetooth– Be independent of any network infrastructure

Existing Implementations•DTN2, IBR-DTN, and Bytewalla

•Not suitable in our target scenario as they somewhat use infrastructure

SocialDTN Architecture• Base and Android Libraries

SocialDTN Architecture• Base Library

– Core functionalities• Bundle Protocol Agent• Convergence Layer• Bundle Router

– Routing functionalities• Direct delivery and social-based dLife

• Android Library– Bluetooth Convergence Layer– Discovery Manager

First Experiments• Deployment test with Android devices carried

by seven students

• A traffic generator (load of 6 messages/hour)

• Message size varied between 1 KB and 1 MB representing different applications and data types (e.g., asynchronous chats, email, video sharing)

• Objectives:

– Evaluate the BCL implementation

– Check the implementation of dLife

First Experiments• SocialDTN v1.0 used to disseminate educational

information through health agents in the riverside community of Combu Island

• Agent obtains information while visiting the Bettina Ferro hospital in the UFPA campus

• Received information increases the efficiency of the agent actions as the population is illiterate

Future Steps• Move towards the SocialDTN v2.0, which shall

include the social-based dLife as routing scheme

• Expand the experimentations to the target communities

• Release the collected social traces to the scientific community

Acknowledgements• Thanks are due to:– to Dórian Langbeck for his co-authorship on this paper and

implementation contributions, – to the National Council for Scientific and Technological

Development (CNPq), – to the Amazon Research Foundation (FAPESPA), and – to FCT for financial support of the User-Centric Routing project

(PTDC/EEA-TEL/103637/2008) and the PhD grant (SFRH/BD/62761/2009) of Waldir Moreira

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