Enhancing opportunistic networks with legacy nodes

Abstract

Mobile opportunistic networking utilizes device-to-device communication to provide messaging and content sharing mechanisms between mobile users without the need for supporting infrastructure networks. However, enabling opportunistic networking in practice requires a sufficient number of users to download, install, and run the respective routing and application software to provide sufficient node density, and thus connectivity for the network to actually function. In this paper, we explore reaching out to nodes that have not (yet) installed any dedicated software to: (1) allow them to access public content in an opportunistic network to possibly seed their interest and (2) instrument them to assist as (limited) message carriers to improve connectivity. We report on our system design and implementation and offer performance insights gained from simulations and initial experiments.

Composable Distributed Mobile Applications and Services in Opportunistic Networks

“…The web-only nodes have the same mobility characteristics but can only communicate with the Liberouter devices, not with the full nodes or each other. Note that the web-only nodes can carry messages between the Liberouters, which assumes that the user keeps the web app loaded when moving between Liberouters, and that the browser can upload the web content to other Liberouters-we have demonstrated such a mechanism in previous work [189]. In the testbed scenario we add 10 Liberouters and no web-only nodes (instead we connect a real web client to each Liberouter in the testbed to send and receive live test traffic).…”