Challenge Overview
The Office of Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) at NASA Headquarters leads the Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) investigation with the goal of advancing the maturity and heritage (space flight use) of the DTN communication protocols.
Delay tolerant networks make use of store-and-forward techniques within the network in order to compensate for intermittent link connectivity. In the DTN the fundamental concept is an architecture based on Internet-independent middleware where protocols at all layers are used that best suit the operation within each environment, with a new overlay network protocol (bundle protocol) inserted between the applications and the locally optimized communications stacks.
TopCoder setup two sets of Amazon EC2 virtual machines containing two different DTN implementation: DTN2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dtn) and ION-DTN (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/).
This competition will take on server of each VM and configure them to interoperate using TCP convergence layer as well as ION-DTN talk to a Python LTP implementation.
All you need is placed in the VMs (you might need to install only Python and perform minor research to test interoperability). It is a low-price, but quick competition and it will get you ready for future ION-DTN competitions
This is a 4 days competition!
Final Submission Guidelines
See wiki spec: http://apps.topcoder.com/wiki/display/docs/DTN2+-+ION+System+Interoperability+Assembly