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The N4C Project

N4C is an acronym for Networking for Communications Challenged Communities. The project resulted from a proposal by a consortium of 12 partners to the EU SEVENTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME THEME [ICT-2-1.6] in the New paradigms and experimental facilities Small or medium-scale focused research project STREP - CP-FP-INFSO category. The project was designed to last for three years and featured a sequence of six sets of experimental trials (winter and summer) in two test bed areas. The project started in May 2008 and ended in April 2011.

The test bed areas are situated in the sort of areas that are communications challenged in the context of the project. The experimental work is aimed at showing that Internet-style connectivity can be realized economically in these areas with effective bandwidths closer to the sort of values that urban broadband users are now used to rather than the expensive low bandwidth satellite connections that are often the only alternative.

The project is part of the FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) Initiative which encourages research by experimentation.

Project Overview

The experimental work that N4C carries out involves the users both for assisting with the design of applications and during the actual experiments. One partner in the consortium is closely tied to each test bed area, being located in the area and being used to working in the area in the normal course of their operations.

The project currently has two web sites:

N4C Project main public web site

N4C Project technical information web site

The main project public web site has the formal deliverables and descriptions of the project in a number of languages.

The technical information web site provides an anchor point for various useful pieces of information that do not fit well into a wiki and also provides handy central reference for the code repository and the wiki.

The Technology of N4C

N4C set out to demonstrate experimentally that Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) was a suitable solution for the problems that we were to investigate. The particular variant of DTN that is involved is that championed by the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) DTN Research Group. An exposition of the fundamentals is provided on the DTN technology page.

We have also done some work on extending the range of fixed link WiMAX by the use of repeaters and using MiMO antennas to improve the signal strength for a given power. Experiments combining WiMAX and DTN have demonstrated that DTN can significantly improve the throughput of WiMAX on long, marginal links as compared with raw TCP.

The N4C Legacy - FIRE federated test bed proposal

One aim of the N4C project was to generate a sustainable long term test bed that could be offered to the FIRE federated test bed facility. This aim has been achieved and N4C partner MEIS have offered their expertise supporting a DTN-based test bed in the Kočevje region of Slovenia to the FIRE federation.

Progress and Outputs

The project has now (May 2011) finished. This wiki will be maintained and expanded to contain information about the project and its results, including the various pieces of code and hardware that might be of interest to other projects using DTN.

The N4C project held its final conference online on Thursday 14 April 2011). For more information on the conference see the conference invitation on our N4C main public web site. The conference event was distributed using Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ Pro Meeting.

In conjunction with the online conference the Partners have produced a set of posters which can be viewed online or downloaded from Final Conference Poster Exhibition. This page also has links to the recorded proceedings of the conference including a video recorded by Vint Cerf.

N4C has now had its final EU review (24 May 2011) and this completes the chronology of the project.

During the project we have developed and improved various software packages most of which are available for download from the N4C [master code repository][backup code repository].

We have also developed a number of hardware components some of which have complete design specifications allowing other projects to build their own versions.

To complement this information we have created a number of pages describing various aspects of the work done during the project. These pages contain links to the various deliverables and public reports created during the project and put them in context with the work that created them: