In this experiment we use a remote controlled airplane and an Android phone to carry data between two computers. The idea is that in environments where you are without a network connection you could still get a working network environment with the help of mobile nodes picking up messages in one area and delivering them in another. A typical scenario is for example rescue operations, where people may move in and out of a difficult to access rescue area and carry messages with them on their mobile phones. Although we focus on chat in this experiment, the real data carried could be anything you could store in a file, e.g. medical data from patients, information gathered from sensors in the environment, images etc.

The image above illustrates the scenario we use in the experiment. Bob and Alice are two users who are unable to communicate directly. Another user, Charlie, has been visiting Bob and is about to go over to Alice. As Bob is unable to reach Alice he delivers his messages to Charlie, who then proceeds to carry them over to Alice. This is the basic principle we evaluate in the experiment. Except Bob and Alice are laptops and Charlie is a cell phone attached to an airplane.

The client we use on the laptops is the same as I wrote for a paper I presented at MILCOM in November. It runs on top of a generic protocol and middleware for distributing content reliably in dynamic network environments, called Mist. In the paper we only evaluated its performance in a virtual environment, so after we finished the paper we thought it would be interesting to see if we could do a real experiment with the same software.

One of my co-authors on the paper, Espen Skjervold, had a remote controlled airplane we used to carry the mobile node. As the plane was small and light we had to find an Android phone that it was able to lift for longer time periods. The phone we ended up using was the Sony Ericsson Xperia x10 mini. According to the specifications it only weighs 88 grams. With the help of high quality electrical tape we taped the phone to the plane, as seen in the picture to the right.

On the Android phone we installed a very basic application which just starts the Mist middleware. It also regularly transmits the GPS coordinates of the phone. For the clients we used two Macbooks running the chat client I wrote for the paper. The clients generate random text strings from Lorem Ipsum every 10 seconds. The phone and the laptops were all configured to join the same ad-hoc wireless network.

The radio range of the laptops and the phone turned out to be much longer than we had anticipated. To reduce the radio range, we placed one of the nodes in the trunk of the car. We placed the other node behind a car at the other end of the parking lot. After some trial and error we managed to find a placement of the nodes which allowed the airplane to only be within the radio range of one laptop at the time.

The image below shows the airplane carrying messages between the two nodes. The nodes are never in contact with the airplane at the same time, so the messages have to be physically carried between the nodes by the Android-phone/airplane.

When the plane comes in contact with one of the nodes the Android-phone picks up any new messages and delivers old ones. The plane then moves out of radio range for while, before it comes in contact with the other node and repeats the process.

The plane we used was not very fast, so we weren't able to reach the same speeds as we tested in the paper. But this small scale demonstration shows that the Mist middleware also works in real world experiments.

The Mist middleware will soon be released as open source.