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DTN7

Traffic correspondent Richter Hammockslam
Photo: Colourbox.de

In disruption-tolerant networking (DTN), data is transmitted in a store-carry-forward fashion from network node to network node, e.g., by people, drones or data mules. Sometimes, disruption-tolerant networking is called delay-tolerant networking. We have developed free and open source DTN implementations of the recently released the Bundle Protocol Version 7.

DTN7-go is written in Go and provides features like memory safety and concurrent execution. With its modular design and interchangeable components, DTN7-go facilitates DTN research and application development. Furthermore, we did an experimental evaluation of DTN7-go and other DTN systems including Serval, IBR-DTN, and Forban. Our results indicate that DTN7 is a flexible and efficient open-source multi-platform implementation of the most recent Bundle Protocol Version 7.

DTN7-rs is written in Rust and provides an implementation focused on speed. With the rust compiler working with the LLVM backend, it can be compiled for a huge amount of platforms, including WebAssembly to be executed in a browser. A conducted evaluation shows that the Rust implementation and WebAssembly as a platform provide enough performance for even higher bundle workloads, while at the same time leaving only a minimal memory/storage footprint.

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