SocialDTN is also part of the DTN-Amazon project fruit of a partnership between SITILabs and GERCOM/UFPA. This presentation introduces this DTN implementation for digital and social inclusion. This presentation was given on my behalf by Dr. Cerqueira in the ACM MobiCom Workshop on Lowest Cost Denominator Networking for Universal Access (LCDNet 2013), on September 30th, 2013 in Miami, USA.

1. SocialDTN: a DTN Implementation for
Digital and Social Inclusion
Waldir Moreira, Ronedo Ferreira, Douglas Cirqueira, Paulo Mendes and Eduardo Cerqueira
cerqueira@ufpa.br
September 30th, 2013
ACM MobiCom Workshop on Lowest Cost Denominator Networking for Universal Access (LCDNet 2013)
Miami, USA

2. Agenda
• Introduction
• Goal
• Scenario
• Existing Implementations
• SocialDTN Architecture
• First Experiments
• Future Steps

3. Introduction
• Nowadays, people still suffer with
digital divide and social exclusion
• Delay/Disruption-Tolerant
Networking can mitigate such
effects by means of opportunistic
and asynchronous communication
• SocialDTN, an Android
implementation of the DTN
architecture

4. Goal
• Mitigate the effects of digital
divide and social exclusion in
the riverside communities

5. Scenario
•
Characteristics
–
Mobile nodes
–
Disruptive and intermittent links
–
Low node density
•
Requirements
–
Exploit social proximity and interactions
between users through Bluetooth
–
Be independent of any network infrastructure

6. Existing Implementations
• DTN2, IBR-DTN, and Bytewalla
• Not suitable in our target
scenario as they somewhat use
infrastructure

7. SocialDTN Architecture
• Base and Android Libraries

8. SocialDTN Architecture
• Base Library
– Core functionalities
• Bundle Protocol Agent
• Convergence Layer
• Bundle Router
– Routing functionalities
• Direct delivery and social-based dLife
• Android Library
– Bluetooth Convergence Layer
– Discovery Manager

9. First Experiments
• Deployment test with Android devices carried
by seven students
• A traffic generator (load of 6 messages/hour)
• Message size varied between 1 KB and 1 MB
representing different applications and data
types (e.g., asynchronous chats, email, video
sharing)
• Objectives:
–
Evaluate the BCL implementation
–
Check the implementation of dLife

10. First Experiments
• SocialDTN v1.0 used to disseminate educational
information through health agents in the
riverside community of Combu Island
• Agent obtains information while visiting the
Bettina Ferro hospital in the UFPA campus
• Received information increases the efficiency of
the agent actions as the population is illiterate

11. Future Steps
• Move towards the SocialDTN v2.0, which shall
include the social-based dLife as routing scheme
• Expand the experimentations to the target
communities
• Release the collected social traces to the
scientific community

12. Acknowledgements
• Thanks are due to:
– to Dórian Langbeck for his co-authorship on this paper and
implementation contributions,
– to the National Council for Scientific and Technological
Development (CNPq),
– to the Amazon Research Foundation (FAPESPA), and
– to FCT for financial support of the User-Centric Routing project
(PTDC/EEA-TEL/103637/2008) and the PhD grant
(SFRH/BD/62761/2009) of Waldir Moreira

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