A Mobile-First Disconnected Data Distribution Network

Previous attempts to bring the data of the internet to environments that do not have continuous connectivity to the internet have made use of special hardware, which requires an additional expenditure on installation. Instead of acquiring special hardware, we take advantage of the ubiquity of Android smartphones and build a secure, software-only infrastructure on top of it called Disconnected Data Distribution (DDD) to exchange application data between disconnected Android phones and corresponding internet services. Although DDD draws ideas from Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), we show how our internet data distribution approach simplifies the DTN architecture while providing stronger guarantees than standard DTN approaches. We design DDD to be inexpensive to deploy and maintain, so it takes an entirely software-only approach to build the infrastructure. The data transporters and clients all run on unmodified Android phones.