Bringing Opportunistic Networking to Smartphones: a Pragmatic Approach

Opportunistic networking allows mobile devices to communicate without any fixed infrastructure, using the store-carry-and-forward principle, based on D2D (device to device) transmissions. Although smartphones may appear as perfect candidates to implement opportunistic networking protocols and algorithms, it turns out that their ability to support D2D transmissions is quite constrained, which hinders the deployment of opportunistic applications at a large scale. Acknowledging this fact we present Ligo, a device that is meant to behave as a peripheral device of a smartphone, providing this smartphone with the opportunistic networking services it cannot implement natively. The hardware components of Ligo are detailed in this paper, as well as the different software elements that enable the communication in the opportunistic network and the interaction with the smartphone.