Design and Implementation of a Bundle Protocol Unified API

Abstract

Approaching Moon and Mars exploration missions have led to new interest in the DTN architecture and a consequent increase in the number of present or planned Bundle Protocol (BP) implementations. As each BP implementation has its own Application Programming Interface (API), a possible negative side effect is that the development of third-party applications is somewhat discouraged, as it would be necessary to develop a specific version for each BP implementation supported, with obvious disadvantages in terms of software consistency and maintenance. To solve this problem, the Unified API presented in this paper aims to offer prospective programmers an “abstracted” interface compatible with most major BP implementations, such as DTN2/DTNME, ION, IBR-DTN and μD3TN. As well as making applications intrinsically multiplatform, the Unified API library also facilitates the development of new applications by presenting an interface resembling the familiar UDP socket, and by moving some of the most challenging BP aspects from the application to the library, as detailed in this paper. The Unified API is part of the DTNsuite, the Unibo collection of DTN applications, all released as free software.