A Mobility Testbed
The Diverse Outdoor Mobile Environment (DOME) project seeks to advance Internet technology so that it can be deployed in environments where providing networking to mobile users is a challenge. Research on these problems is broadly called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). We study DTNs in the context of routing, power management, system design, and application design. This web site provides information on our latest research, including the deployment of the UMass Diverse Outdoor Mobile Environment (DOME).
Our activities:
 |
Construction of a DTN testbed in Amherst, MA called DieselNet. Currently, we have equipped 40 buses that cover 150 square miles.
|
 |
 |
 |
A miniature version of the bus-based technology coupled with some intelligent power management is enabling us to monitor endangered wood turtles in the Amherst area for ecological conservation. | ||
 |
Collaboration with oceanographic partners WHOI for underwater monitoring of coastal areas, including sea life and ocean bottoms. |
Many environments present stark challenges for deployment of current Internet technology.
- Natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes can destroy the power grid, telephone networks, and mobile phone cell towers. Our communications infrastructure is not designed to survive such failure, leaving safety and first responders unable to coordinate.
- Infrastructure outages, like the power outage that occurred on August 14, 2003 in the Northeast, and which are more common with less developed infrastructures, also poise a challenge to a reliable communications infrastructure.
- Developing areas of the world lack always-on Internet connections to remote towns and villages. This is because they lack a robust power infrastructure, dense deployment of cell phone towers, a wired Internet highway backbone, nor a reliable phone network. This maintains the digital divide between Internet-enabled countries and the rest of the world.
- Monitoring of wildlife currently requires scientists to hike into habitats and re-locate tagged animals to record one data point. There are no Internet or other communications technologies in the forest, but our technology allows data of hourly readings of animal behavior to route itself towards the the scientists automatically.
- Underwater monitoring of our bays and oceans, including sensing of plants, sea life, and earthquake fissures requires coverage of a massive area. Very small areas can be monitored now because they require cables out to sea or densely deployed sensing devices. Our technology allows sparse coverage of a broad area of the ocean, allowing data to find its way to buoys and passing ships.