Graduate Student Posters 2007

Authors: Peng Yang, Jianbin Han, Marc Bollinger, Ryan Metzger

In past decades, many architectures were developed for network communication, based on the ISO/OSI Reference Model (e.g. the telephone network PSTN, the Internet architecture, etc.). These network architectures all have been built based on some implicit assumptions about deployment specifications of the underlying network. The most important assumptions are: existence of end-to-end paths between endpoints, reasonably short end-to-end round-trip times, and low transmission error/loss rates. However, these assumptions no longer hold under certain network scenarios (e.g. sparsely connected networks, networks with high node mobility, partitioned networks as a result of infrastructure attacks, natural disasters etc). Such challenging scenarios result in networks with intermittent and weak connectivity, inexistence of end-to-end paths, high link error rates or unpredictably long transmission delays. Consequently, the existing network architectures and protocols are either unable or inefficient to support communication in these scenarios. Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) is a new research area which is concerned with extending the existing protocols or inventing new ones to deal with the communication in the extreme and performance-challenged environments. Our goal is to design routing protocols for Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks to provide reliable communication with high delivery ratio, low latency and low overhead.