Bundle Protocol version 7 Implementation with Configurable Faulty Network and Evaluation

The Bundle Protocol (BP) is a key component that enables delay/disruption-tolerant networking (DTN), an overlay network architecture that facilitates communication in challenging environments with intermittent connectivity. Previous works on DTNs were largely on analyzing or optimizing DTNs instead of studying BP alone itself; hence, whether or not BP is still at an experimental stage must be studied. This work begins by presenting a lightweight implementation of BP Version 7 (BPv7) created by implementing only the required portions of RFC9171, with a new convergence layer that simulates expected and unexpected disruptions for testing purposes. Our implementation is lightweight enough to be easily extendable for additional tests and simple enough to be used for educational purposes. Some preliminary, lightweight experiments indicate that BPv7, even with only the required parts in RFC9171, can serve its purpose and still ensures essential functionalities. It tolerates disruptions and infinitely long delays well, as intended. Moreover, it handles large data dumps and floods of packets well, as long as they are infrequent. In the course of our implementation and experiments, we identified potential architectural, specification, and deployment-related flaws of BP, and suggested solutions or directions toward them from the perspective of software engineering and network algorithms.