IP over Avian Carriers


In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers is a proposal to carry Internet Protocol traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in RFC 1149, a Request for Comments issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force, written by D. Waitzman, and released on April 1, 1990. It is one of several April Fools' Day Request for Comments.
Waitzman described an improvement of his protocol in RFC 2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service. Later, in RFC 6214—released on 1 April 2011, and 13 years after the introduction of IPv6—Brian Carpenter and Robert Hinden published Adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6.
IPoAC has been successfully implemented, but for only nine packets of data, with a packet loss ratio of 55%, and a response time ranging from 3,000 seconds to over 6,000 seconds. Thus, this technology suffers from poor latency. Nevertheless, for large transfers, avian carriers are capable of high average throughput when carrying flash memory devices, effectively implementing a sneakernet. During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus the bandwidth of an avian carrier has increased 3 times as fast as the bandwidth of the Internet. IPoAC may achieve bandwidth peaks of orders of magnitude more than the Internet when used with multiple avian carriers in rural areas. For example: If 16 homing pigeons are given eight 512 GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 145.6 Gbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards.

Real-life implementation

On 28 April 2001, IPoAC was implemented by the Bergen Linux user group, under the name CPIP. They sent nine packets over a distance of approximately five kilometers, each carried by an individual pigeon and containing one ping, and received four responses.

Script started on Sat Apr 28 11:24:09 2001
$ /sbin/ifconfig tun0
tun0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
 inet addr:10.0.3.2 P-t-P:10.0.3.1 Mask:255.255.255.255
 UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:150 Metric:1
 RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0
 RX bytes:88 TX bytes:168 
$ ping -c 9 -i 900 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 : 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
--- 10.0.3.1 ping statistics ---
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
Script done on Sat Apr 28 14:14:28 2001

This real life implementation was mentioned by the French MP Martine Billard in the French Assemblée Nationale, during debates about Hadopi.
The implementation was noted in the song "Paper Pings" by Steve Savitzky.

Risks

In December 2005, a Gartner report on bird flu that concluded “A pandemic wouldn't affect IT systems directly” was humorously criticized for neglecting to consider RFC 1149 and RFC 2549 in its analysis.
Although collisions are unlikely, packets can be lost, particularly to raptors.

Other avian data transfer methods

Rafting photographers already use pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator. Over a 30-mile distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compares very favorably to current ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives.
On March 12 2004, Yossi Vardi, Ami Ben-Bassat, and Guy Vardi sent 3 homing pigeons from a distance of 100 km, each carrying 20-22 tiny memory cards containing 1.3 GB, amounting in total of 4 GB of data, achieving an effective throughput of 2.27 Mbps. The purpose of the test was to measure and confirm an improvement over RFC 2549. Since the developers used flash memory instead of paper notes as specified by RFC 2549, the experiment was widely criticized as an example in which an optimized implementation breaks an official standard.
Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
In November 2009 the Australian comedy/current-affairs television program Hungry Beast repeated this experiment. The Hungry Beast team took up the challenge after a fiery parliament session wherein the government of the time blasted the opposition for not supporting telecommunications investments, saying that if the opposition had their way, Australians would be doing data transfer over carrier pigeons. The Hungry Beast team had read about the South African experiment and assumed that, as a developed western country, Australia would have higher speeds. The experiment had the team transfer a 700MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest: A carrier pigeon with a microSD card, a car carrying a USB Stick, and a Telstra ADSL line. The data was to be transferred from Tarana in rural New South Wales to the western-Sydney suburb of Prospect, New South Wales, a distance of 132 km by road. Approximately halfway through the race the internet connection unexpectedly dropped and the transfer had to be restarted. The pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not coming back. The estimated time to upload completion at one point was as high as 9 hours, and at no point did the estimated upload time fall below 4 hours.
A similar "Pigeon Race" was conducted in September 2010 by tech blogger and ISP Timico CTO Trefor Davies with farmer Michelle Brumfield in rural Yorkshire, England: delivering a five-minute video to a BBC correspondent 75 miles away in Skegness. The pigeon was pitted against an upload to YouTube via British Telecom broadband; the pigeon was released at 11.05 am and arrived in the loft one hour and fifteen minutes later while the upload was still incomplete, having failed once in the interim.