404 not found: a quest for DTN applications

1. EXTENDED ABSTRACT Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) [3] has moved a long way from its—for many probably somewhat elite—origin of a technology for an Interplanetary Internet in the late 1990s to an established research discipline. One major contributor to this trend was the observation that quite a few terrestrial networks exhibit delay-tolerant properties, albeit of different nature: from sparse mobile ad-hoc to sensor networks to mobile Internet access, we find delay tolerance as an important element to describe communication behavior and to design protocols suitable for operation in the respective challenged networking environment. And even fixed infrastructure networks may benefit from delay-tolerant approaches to data transmission [7]—as did UUNet decades ago, when forwarding mails and news in a multi-hop store-and-forward fashion enabled communication involving machines that were not “always on” in the first place. Delay-tolerant networking has contributed to our understanding of networking at least in a twofold manner: