[Ict4d] Fwd: Is DTN dead?

[Melissa Densmore]

I would hesitate to say "dead" but you are right, there hasn't been that
much work done recently in the space - pretty much since Keshav switched
over to environmental sensing.  Even my Ghana Telemedicine Network stuff
was done back in 2008.  The main difficulty I think we struggled with was
that it takes a ton of work to get a stable DTN going - and often by the
time we got something working, mobile phones or DSL would arrive and
immediately displace our efforts.  At the same time, it's been 10 years and
some parts of Africa are still largely unconnected.  I don't think the
applicability of DTN has reduced - but the number of researchers looking to
leverage it in isolated places has greatly reduced.  It's possible that the
DTN reference architecture is simply too much overhead for rural
deployments, with no clear benefits (e.g. interoperability, etc) for using
it. Tons of people use informal DTNs (flash drives, Netflix, media kiosks)
without using a formal network architecture worthy of a paper.

Some other relevant papers:
Luk, Rowena, Melissa Ho, and Paul M. Aoki. "Asynchronous remote medical
consultation for Ghana." *Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human
factors in computing systems*. ACM, 2008. http://arxiv.org/pdf/0801.1927

Ho, Melissa, and Kevin Fall. "Poster: Delay tolerant networking for sensor
networks." *Proc. of IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications
and Networks*. 2004.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.59.3330&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Digital Study Hall was also originally a DTN-based system, most recently
presented in 2012, but focus has shifted to questions of interaction rather
than content delivery
Richard Anderson, Chad Robertson, Esha Nabi, Urvashi Sahni, and Tanuja
Setia. 2012. Facilitated video instruction in low resource schools. In
*Proceedings
of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication
Technologies and Development* (ICTD '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2-12.
DOI=10.1145/2160673.2160675 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2160673.2160675

There's also dtn stuff on SaamiNet (2009)
Doria, Avri, Maria Uden, and D. Pandey. "Providing connectivity to the
saami nomadic community." *generations* 1.2 (2009): 3.

David - I would pose this question on the gaia mailing list, which includes
a lot of the people that originally worked on the DTN architecture for both
space and rural motivations.

Melissa

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:56 PM, David Johnson <djohnson at csir.co.za> wrote:

> Hi all
>
> One of my lectures in my Net4D honours modules is on the use of DTN as
> a connectivity option for poorly connected areas. The slides I have
> are mostly about historical work such as DakNet (2004) and KioskNet
> (2007)
>
> My sense is that this research has mainly continued to have traction
> in the realm of Vehicular networks and space networks and that its no
> longer considered as a serious contender for rural/poorly connected
> regions ... there are some interesting new developments that mix
> social networks and delay tolerant networks - but they seem mostly
> like playful ideas than something to take seriously.
>
> Then you get weirdness like this 2014 paper from Disney on a DTN
> solution for mico-entrepeneurs using  DTN-enabled projects (cinemas in
> a backpack) - the example being moving content between urban areas in
> Pretoria and an under-served ex-homeland North of Pretoria - there is
> not one African researcher on the paper ... I think I will use this as
> a prime example of what goes wrong when communities don't participate
> in the research process.
>
> So DTN for rural/under-serviced areas - dead?
>
> David Johnson
> Principal Researcher
> Networks and Media group
> Meraka, CSIR
> Adjunct Senior Lecturer
> ICT4D, Computer Science Department
> University of Cape Town
>
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