I recently had a chance to visit an interesting wireless communication laboratory. WINLAB in Rutgers university hosts a radio grid testbed called Orbit. The testbed consists of 400 Linux boxes each equipped with 4 different radio interfaces. The researchers may get root access to all boxes, so that they are able to modify radio and network related functionality in the kernel level.

Despite having 400*4 radios above your head, they promised that your brain should not be boiling while in the room. The black hats in the picture were an interesting detail, they cover the nodes from water leaks from pipelines or from fire extinguishers, and they have proven to be useful.

The Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) paradigm aims to design future networking protocols and architectures in a way that they work in environments where large delays occur and end-to-end paths for communication may not exists. DTN Research Group is a forum that gets together the professionals from industry and academia who work on DTN research and development.