End-to-end Behavior of Delay Tolerant Networks with Message Ferries

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) are high delay networks with intermittent connectivity. Transport protocols developed either for high bandwidth networks or low delay networks suffer significantly on these type of networks. We have studied the impact of various transport protocols and application level protocols on a specific type of DTN namely Message Ferry Networks. At present there is no specific transport protocol that adapts well to the characteristics of Message Ferry networks. We developed a protocol that is well suited for Message ferry networks. Our protocol ensures major characteristics of a reliable transport protocol like in order delivery and reliable transfer of data without compromising on the throughput. We simulated our protocol by modifying the TCP process model in Opnet and compared it with standard TCP. The simulation results show a drastic improvement over the standard TCP protocol.