Routing characterization in volatile connectivity environments

Nowadays, there is a number of applications that only run on mobile devices. Mobility is a feature required by an increasing number of current applications. Mobile applications are often required to work even in a scenario with frequent disconnections. These environments with intermittent connectivity compose the so-called Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks (ICMN), where long disconnection intervals and opportunistic connections are assumed. Although the main challenge in such networks is the fact of designing efficient routing protocols to deliver messages from a source to a destination, there is no research focused on providing a generic framework to validate the existing routing schemes proposed by researchers. In this paper, we study the possibility of creating a networking technology for volatile network environments where messages can participate in forwarding decisions as they progress across the network.