In their IEEE Communications Magazine, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) provides information on all aspects of communications. In April 2022, they published an article, written by us, about our concept of ring road networks (RRN), in which the functionality of delay-tolerant networking (DTN) and RRNs is being explained in detail and in an easily comprehensible way.

The main issue that we´d wish to overcome with our technology is the fact, that there are still several billion people without reliable Internet access. With RRNs however, it would be possible to provide Internet even to the most isolated areas at a very low cost, mainly with the implementation of DTN protocols and inexpensive nano-satellites such as CubeSats. The article not only deals with the fundamentals of RRNs, but also presents supporting research including several experiments and projects, such as our field tests conducted with OPS-SAT – a three-unit CubeSat satellite operated by the ESA. These were the first tests using the new version 7 of the DTN bundle protocol in the low Earth orbit (LEO). Furthermore, due to this experiment we were able to prove our µD3TN implementation successful, which is an open source lightweight DTN protocol implementation that we´ve developed to enable the flow of data in RRNs.

Check out the full article for more information!