Unibo-BP: enhancements and extensions

The development of Unibo-BP has represented a big step forward in the field of Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) research at University of Bologna. The fact that Unibo-BP is a research-driven, fully compliant implementation of the Bundle Protocol (BP) version 7 (BPv7), highlights Unibo’s commitment to staying at the forefront of DTN research. The modularity of Unibo-BP code allows researchers to add new features or modifications to existing components in a relatively easy way. Dealing with Unibo-BP, which is a big and complex project, a preliminary necessary step was to understand how Unibo-BP and its ecosystem (in particular Unibo-LTP and Unified API) work; to this end, learn how to debug in the best way all the project was crucial. Once achieved the necessary familiarity with the code, the first goal was to improve the Unibo-LTP interface to Unibo-BP; thanks to this improvement it is now possible to map the bundle QoS to the different services (“colors”) offered by LTP. The second goal, was to add the Metadata bundle extension in Unibo-BP. This not only required to implement the extension, but also to modify its original format, conceived for BPv6, to make it compatible with BPv7. To allow DTNsuite applications to use the new Metadata extensions, it was also necessary to modify the Unified API library on which all DTNsuite applications are based (in particular, the Unified API interface to Unibo-BP had to be augmented). In conclusion, this thesis was the first to introduce modifications and improvements to Unibo-BP (and related software), but hopefully not the last; the hope is that the work done can be useful to future students and researchers.