DELAY-TOLERANT NETWORKING: MOVING TOWARDS REAL-WORLD DEPLOYMENT
Elwyn Davies · 2011
Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) has been a research topic for more than 10 years since Vinton Cerf and NASA started working on means to expand Internet-like connectivity to situations such as communications with spacecraft on deep space missions. The distances involved and the constraints of light speed mean that the large round trip delays make conventional Internet protocols such as TCP unusable. The DTN architecture and the Bundle Protocol suite that have been developed to enable communication in challenged environments, both in space and in terrestrial situations, have now reached a level of development and testing where they are able to be used to support users in real-world situations. This paper describes some of the work that has been done to demonstrate real-world applications of DTN, especially in the N4C project in which the author was a partner, and articulates a vision of how DTN can be used to support a future Internet where information items become 'first class citizens', enabling Information Centric Networking (ICN).