[Ict4d] 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.  Even my Ghana Telemedicine Network
stuff was done back in 2008 (see attached).  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.

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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>
>
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