Beyond Opportunistic Networking Protocols: a Disruption-Tolerant Application Suite for Disconnected MANETs

Abstract

Delay/disruption-tolerant networking and opportunistic networking have emerged as promising solutions to support communication between people in environments devoid of any infrastructure network. Although many protocols have been proposed in the literature to support message forwarding or message dissemination in such conditions, a very few of these protocols have been implemented in fully-functional communication systems, and can thus be used to conduct experiments with real applications and real users. In this paper we present an application suite we designed in order to provide people with opportunistic communication means such as email, text and voice messaging, file sharing, etc. We also present some results of a preliminary experimentation campaign we conducted in order to evaluate these applications in a real setting.