Providing Service-Connectivity in Delay Tolerant Networks

In delay tolerant networks (DTNs) such as wireless ad hoc networks, frequent and long-duration partitioning of networks causes continuous end-to-end connectivity to be non-guaranteed. Hence, in order to enable legacy applications to run in this DTN environment,the communication protocol stack should be modified to transparently provide applications with the service connectivity. In this paper, therefore, we propose a DTN service architecture and its corresponding protocols, where cross-layering techniques between transport and network layers are exploited. Using ns-2 simulator, we verify that our approach enables end-to-end applications to resume their communication after service disruption. It also has low routing overhead, as compared to the existing approach without this DTN service functionality.