μPCN — A bundle protocol implementation for microcontrollers

Over the last decade, Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) has evolved from a new idea to a set of ready-to-use specifications and implementations. Substantial research and development efforts have been devoted to enabling new forms of communication via these solutions in contexts not addressed by earlier communication approaches. A few years ago, the Ring Road concept has been proposed as a potential usage field of DTN protocols. Its core idea is to leverage low-cost satellites (e.g. CubeSats) to enable world-wide communication and access to the Internet for low investment costs. Though many DTN protocol implementations are available, there is none that fully fits this application domain in the case a microcontroller with restricted memory and processing resources is used. In this paper a novel DTN protocol implementation named Micro Planetary Communication Network is introduced. It is intended for microcontroller platforms and offers a new routing approach designed for the application in a Ring Road infrastructure.