Section: New Results

Routing in FUN

Participants : Valeria Loscri, Nathalie Mitton, Riccardo Petrolo.

According to a wide range of studies, IT should become a key facilitator in establishing primary education, reducing mortality and supporting commercial initiatives in Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The main barrier to the development of IT services in these regions is not only the lack of communication facilities, but also the lack of consistent information systems, security procedures, economic and legal support, as well as political commitment. In [3] , [10] , we propose the vision of an infrastructure-less data platform well suited for the development of innovative IT services in LDCs. We propose a participatory approach, where each individual implements a small subset of a complete information system thanks to highly secure, portable and low-cost personal devices as well as opportunistic networking, without the need of any form of infrastructure. We review the technical challenges that are specific to this approach. Relying on such an infrastructure, wireless routing must be opportunistic and take advantages of the availability of every infrastructure point when in range. Two different approaches depending on the available devices are presented in [20] and [2] . When partial positions of nodes are available, the system can take advantage of such knowledge to enhance the routing performance. This is what has been investigated in[12] where coordinates are used in an opportunistic fashion when available.