Message fragmentation in opportunistic DTNs

Delay-tolerant networking is used for communication in challenged environments such as MANETs, in which links are unstable and end-to-end paths between communicating nodes may not exist. Messages may be significantly larger than packets in IP networks. Large messages lead to longer transfer times rendering it more likely that a link breaks in the middle of a message transfer. This motivates investigating how to support partial message transfers through fragmentation. In this paper, we formulate fragmentation independent of routing algorithms, introduce several fragmentation strategies, and evaluate these by simulations to derive recommendations for using fragmentation in DTNs.