Making bundle protocol into a game

Abstract

Over the last ten years interest in the field of delay and disruption-tolerant, challenged, and opportunistic networks has grown dramatically. Communication protocols originally designed to accommodate communication in the intermittent and high-delay environment of deep space have been applied to sensor networks, battlefield networks, and more recently, peer-to-peer content sharing and social networking. However despite a flurry of creative proposals for ways this new technology could be used, and the diaspora of mobile phone apps whose sole novelty is to mimic the behavior of an opportunistic network, the technology has not found its way into common use, even among the researchers who specialize in the field. We are developing competitive challenges, or games, in which participants would use BP in order to accomplish some nominal goal. By making the activity competitive and offering some reward to the best performers, we hope to get large numbers of conference attendees communicating with BP on a daily basis. In the process people will begin to discover how DTN technology and associated applications can be used to meet their own communication needs. Though these games do provide some entertainment value, the point of the activity is to get people using DTNs to communicate in a real environment, to stress test the available DTN software, and to spur the development of DTN-capable applications.