Security and performance aspects of Bytewalla: A Delay Tolerant Network on smartphones

This paper presents an implementation of a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) on the Android platform on mobile smartphones that we named “Bytewalla”. Moreover, we present an implementation of a security solution for Bytewalla based on the IRTF DTN Bundle Security protocol specification to protect the bundle content while in transit to the destination. Then, we make a throughout analysis of the data transmission overhead of the security protected bundles, which has direct consequences on the power consumption and system performance. Our overall, conclusion is that the integration of DTN links in the general IP-network architecture is feasible and will make it easier to integrate DTN applications into communication-challenged areas. To our knowledge our implementation of the bundle protocol is the first for the Android platform.