Wireless opportunistic connections are the primary mechanism for transferring data between disconnected nodes, such as vehicles, remote sensors, or village kiosks [8,4,13] in a delay tolerant network (DTN). Opportunistic connections may last from seconds, as in the case of a rapid drive-by, to several minutes. During this short connection window, it is important to maximize data transfer between DTN nodes. We use microbenchmarks to study the wireless transfer performance of the DTN reference implementation, which is the most widely used DTN implementation today [9]. Existing DTN deployments utilize low-cost, low-power devices that tend to have slow CPUs [13]. Based on these characteristics, we hypothesize about the effect of control parameters on opportunistic data transfer. We test our hypotheses through a series of experiments and show that the principal performance bottleneck is the CPU. We also found that the choice of DTN bundle size affects performance by a factor of up to 60.
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