An adaptive middleware to support delay tolerant networking
Agoston Petz, Christine Julien · 2008
Delay Tolerant Networks are emerging as a new form of network in which sending and receiving nodes may not be reliably connected to each other in a traditional sense but must instead rely on mobile nodes to ferry messages through the network. Applications operating in these dynamic mixed environments would like their connections to be supported by the network technology best suited to the combination of the communication session's requirements and instantaneous network context. In this paper, we explore the systems issues related to enabling such a symbiotic network architecture. We develop an adaptive middleware that enables connections to seamlessly migrate from one communication style to another in response to changing network or application conditions. We delineate the properties of the middleware architecture, describe an initial implementation, and provide a simulation analysis that demonstrates that, given perfect context-awareness, significant performance improvements can be made by using such an adaptive middleware.