[Ict4d] Fwd: Is DTN dead?

[Edwin Blake]

The eGranary project has just featured on Al Jazeera. Seems to be 
running in Nigeria to give access to books and web for limited 
connection situations.

On 9/06/15 12:28, Melissa Densmore wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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-- 
Edwin Blake                                     <edwin at cs.uct.ac.za>
Professor,                                      Tel  +27 21 650 3661
Computer Science, University of Cape Town,      Fax  +27 21 650 3551
Private Bag X3, Rondebosch  7701, South Africa.
URL:   http://www.cs.uct.ac.za/~edwin

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