Writing on the clean slate: Implementing a socially-aware protocol in Haggle

Developing protocols and applications for opportunistic networking can represent a daunting task given the many aspects that must be taken into consideration, such as intermittent connectivity, smart choice among multiple interfaces and intelligent data storage. The implementation of these protocols can be based on generic layer-less communication frameworks that provide programming abstractions for the extraction and analysis of social, colocation and mobility information and allows data exchange by means of heterogeneous devices. We propose Gently, a novel fully implemented solution which combines techniques of context awareness and social knowledge to concretely solve issues related to opportunistic forwarding. More precisely, Gently is born as the combination of the Context-aware Adaptive Routing (CAR) and the socially aware LABEL protocol. We discuss the implementation of our solution on top of the layer-less Haggle framework presenting the key design choices and the lessons learnt.