DTN routing protocols on resource constrained devices: Design, implementation and first experiments

In this paper, we present our experience in designing a reference architecture for implementing Delay Tolerant Networking protocols running on resource constrained devices. The proposed architecture, has been employed to implement the Epidemic protocol on the Openbeacon active tags, and it has been validated on a simple experiment for data collection, in which 20 students carrying the tags are asked to freely move in a room while generating data that are collected by two sinks. Our experiments show that some of the simplistic assumptions made in the simulation of DTN protocols, such as the perfect knowledge of the neighborhood, are not valid in real test-bed and can significantly affect the performance of the routing algorithms.