Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN)

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I. INTRODUCTION

DTN is fundamentally an intermittent network, where the communication links only exist temporarily, rendering it impossible to establish end-to-end connections for data delivery.

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is a new area of research in the field of networking that deals with extending existing protocols or inventing new ones in a coordinated, architecturally clean fashion, to improve network communication when connectivity is periodic, intermittent and/or prone to disruptions and when multiple heterogeneous underlying networks may need to be utilized to effect data transfers.

The challenges of this field of research are:

1. Large delays (due to physical distances, small bandwidth, or extended disconnection).
2. A second challenge is efficient routing in the presence of frequently disconnected, pre-scheduled, or opportunistic link availability.
3. A third challenge is high link-error rates that make end-to-end reliability difficult.

Finally, heterogeneous underlying network technologies (including non-IP-based internetworks) and application structure and security mechanisms capable of limiting network access prior to data transit are required in environments where feedback may be highly limited.

A. Nodes in a Delay-Tolerant Network

In a DTN, a node is an entity with a bundle layer. A node may be a host, router, or gateway (or some combination) acting as a source, destination, or forwarder of bundles:

• Host—Sends and/or receives bundles, but does not forward them. A host can be a source or destination of a bundle transfer. The bundle layers of hosts that operate over long-delay links require persistent storage in which to queue bundles until outbound links are available. Hosts may optionally support c...

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...s at a slight non-negligible cost, we cannot take chance by allowing the nodes to communicate without any authentication, as the network is wireless, any node (say, malicious) can join a cluster or intercept the transmission range of other valid nodes and then can transmit its’ information. Thus, authentication is also as important as routing.

As a future-work, since all our work was based on a static instance of the Delay Tolerant Network, it has to be extended to dynamic networks in future in-order to gain a better conclusion. Also, based on this dynamic movement of nodes, cluster-head and gateway node has to be selected accordingly, and routing of messages should take place.

Works Cited

Ha Dang, Hongyi Wu, “Clustering and Cluster-Based Routing Protocol for Delay-Tolerant Mobile Networks”, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 9, NO. 6, JUNE 2010.

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