Delay and Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) II Dagstuhl Seminar 09071 – Executive Summary

Today’s Internet architecture and protocols, while perfectly suitable for wellconnected users, may easily experience serious performance degradation and entirely stop working in more challenged networking environments. Such environments are manifold, ranging from mobile users experiencing occasional or frequent disconnections to communication services for remote areas, to vehicular network communication in large areas, sensor networks to habitat or wildlife monitoring, and to space and underwater communications. These scenarios all share two commonalities: that an end-to-end path between two communicating nodes may not exist at any single point in time and that communication delay may be significant. Luckily, in most cases, delay in the delivery of the data can be tolerated. However, with the continued expansion of the Internet into new areas and the increasing penetration of communication technologies into more areas of life and technology, these environments become commonplace and are no longer restricted to exotic sensing applications but are quickly becoming relevant to consumers in everyday life. Many attempts over recent years of incrementally fixing the Internet protocols in a bottom up fashion have only achieved partial successes: while mobile IP, HIP, transport, session, and cross-layer approaches may support changes of network attachments and short-term disconnections, a more fundamental approach is needed to ad-