On applying DTNs to a delay constrained scenario in wired networks

The Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture has been successful in addressing communication issues such as disruption, variable delay, and network partitioning. DTN uses intermittently available links to communicate opportunistically regardless of delivery delay. In the literature, much work has been done mainly to improve the rate of message delivery and routing algorithms. However, previous work has not focused on guaranteeing the message delivery delay in a DTN scenario. In addition, real deployments of DTN systems have so far been mostly proof-of-concepts in research projects. We address the problem of delivery delay in a wired DTN scenario where messages are moved across a time-varying graph topology whose dynamics are known in advance and can be modified. We propose a framework that guarantees bounded delivery delay of users´ data. To demonstrate the feasibility of our network management approach, we evaluate our framework on a 10-node wired DTN topology deployed on the Grid5000 platform¹.