In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers is a humorously-intended 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 RFCs. 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, Carpenter and 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 3000 seconds to over 6000 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 faster than 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 32 GB SD cards each,
and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 9102 Mbit/s,
excluding transfer to and from the SD cards.
Real-life implementation On 28 April 2001, IPoAC was actually implemented
by the Bergen Linux user group. 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 vegard@gyversalen:~$ 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
vegard@gyversalen:~$ 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 minmax = 3211900.86388671.9 ms
vegard@gyversalen:~$ exit
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.
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 RFC1149 and RFC2549 in its analysis.
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.
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 carrying a microSD
card, versus 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 that 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, Australian speeds would be higher. 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, or 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 132km 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 by Michelle Brumfield in rural Yorkshire, England: delivering
a five-minute video to a BBC correspondent 75 miles away in Skegness. She pitted the
pigeon against an upload to YouTube via British Telecom broadband; the pigeon arrived in about
ninety minutes while the upload was still incomplete, having failed once in the interim.
In September 2010, ISP Timico UK pitted a few homing pigeons against a rural broadband
connection to see which was faster. Each pigeon carried a microSD card with 200 MB of HD
video data, while simultaneously a typical Internet connection was used to upload the
same video data to YouTube. This was done to raise awareness of poor Internet speeds
experienced by many rural users. See also
Semaphore Flag Signaling System Homing pigeon
April Fools' Day RFC References
External links "Carrier Pigeons Bringing Contraband into
Prisons", Bruce Schneier, www.schneier.com, June 27, 2008
Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight, Stephen Shankland, CNET News, May 4, 2001
"Winston the homing pigeon draws tweets of support", The Mail and Guardian, September
10, 2009 "The Unlimited"
http:www.mg.co.za2009-09-10-pigeon-carries-data-bundles-faster-than-telkom