An adaptive middleware to support delay tolerant networking

ABSTRACT

Delay Tolerant Networks are emerging as a new form of network in which sending and receiving nodes may not be reliably connected to each other in a traditional sense but must instead rely on mobile nodes to ferry messages through the network. Applications operating in these dynamic mixed environments would like their connections to be supported by the network technology best suited to the combination of the communication session's requirements and instantaneous network context. In this paper, we explore the systems issues related to enabling such a symbiotic network architecture. We develop an adaptive middleware that enables connections to seamlessly migrate from one communication style to another in response to changing network or application conditions. We delineate the properties of the middleware architecture, describe an initial implementation, and provide a simulation analysis that demonstrates that, given perfect context-awareness, significant performance improvements can be made by using such an adaptive middleware.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Baig, M. Hassan, and L. Libman. Prediction-based recovery from link outages in on-board mobile communication networks. In Proc. of IEEE Globecom 2004, pages 1575--1579, 2004.
• 2: Mark Carson , Darrin Santay, NIST Net: a Linux-based network emulation tool, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.33 n.3, July 2003 [doi>10.1145/956993.957007]
• 3: A. Doria, M. Uden, and D. Pandey. Providing connectivity to the Saami nomadic community. In Proc. of the 2^nd Int'l. Conf. on Open Collaborative Design for Sustainable Development, 2002.
• 4: Kevin Fall, A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 25-29, 2003, Karlsruhe, Germany [doi>10.1145/863955.863960]
• 5: K. Harras, K. Almeroth, and E. Belding-Royer. Delay tolerant mobile networks (DTMNs): Controlled flooding in sparse mobile networks. In Proc. of the 4^th Int'l. IFIP-TC6 Networking Conf., pages 1180--1192, May 2005.
• 6: Tuomo Hyyryläinen , Teemu Kärkkäinen , Cheng Luo , Valdas Jaspertas , Jouni Karvo , Jörg Ott, Opportunistic email distribution and access in challenged heterogeneous environments, Proceedings of the second ACM workshop on Challenged networks, September 14-14, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1287791.1287811]
• 7: O. J and D. Kutscher. A disconnection-tolerant transport for drive-thru internet environments. In Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, pages 1849--1862, 2005.
• 8: Sushant Jain , Kevin Fall , Rabin Patra, Routing in a delay tolerant network, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.34 n.4, October 2004
• 9: Dilip Joseph , Jayanth Kannan , Ayumu Kubota , Karthik Lakshminarayanan , Ion Stoica , Klaus Wehrle, OCALA: an architecture for supporting legacy applications over overlays, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, p.20-20, May 08-10, 2006, San Jose, CA
• 10: Philo Juang , Hidekazu Oki , Yong Wang , Margaret Martonosi , Li Shiuan Peh , Daniel Rubenstein, Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking: design tradeoffs and early experiences with ZebraNet, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.37 n.10, October 2002
• 11: A. Lindgren, A. Doria, and O. Schelen. Probabilistic routing in intermittently connected networks. In Proc. of the 1^st Int'l. Wkshp. on Service Assurance with Partial and Intermittent Resources, pages 239--254, 2004.
• 12: Harsha V. Madhyastha , Arun Venkataramani , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Thomas Anderson, Oasis: an overlay-aware network stack, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.40 n.1, January 2006 [doi>10.1145/1113361.1113371]
• 13: D. Maltz and P. Bhagwat. MSOCKS: an architecture for transport layer mobility. Proc. of INFOCOM, 3.
• 14: Y. Mao, B. Knutsson, H. Lu, and J. Smith. DHARMA: Distributed home agent for robust mobile access. In Proc. of INFOCOM, pages 1196--1206, 2005.
• 15: E. Nordstrom and H. Lundgren. AODV-UU Implementation from Uppsala University.
• 16: One laptop per child. http://laptop.org, 2007.
• 17: Jörg Ott, Application protocol design considerations for a mobile internet, Proceedings of first ACM/IEEE international workshop on Mobility in the evolving internet architecture, December 01-01, 2006, San Francisco, California [doi>10.1145/1186699.1186720]
• 18: Jörg Ott , Dirk Kutscher , Christoph Dwertmann, Integrating DTN and MANET routing, Proceedings of the 2006 SIGCOMM workshop on Challenged networks, p.221-228, September 11-15, 2006, Pisa, Italy [doi>10.1145/1162654.1162659]
• 19: Pubudu N. Pathirana , Nirupama Bulusu , Andrey V. Savkin , Sanjay Jha, Node Localization Using Mobile Robots in Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, v.4 n.3, p.285-296, May 2005 [doi>10.1109/TMC.2005.43]
• 20: Alex (Sandy) Pentland , Richard Fletcher , Amir Hasson, DakNet: Rethinking Connectivity in Developing Nations, Computer, v.37 n.1, p.78-83, January 2004 [doi>10.1109/MC.2004.1260729]
• 21: Charles E. Perkins , Elizabeth M. Royer, Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computer Systems and Applications, p.90, February 25-26, 1999
• 22: A. Petz and C. Julien. An adaptive architecture to support delay tolerant networking. Technical Report TR-UTEDGE-2008-002, The Center for Excellence in Distributed Global Environments, The University of Texas at Austin, 2008.
• 23: I. Rhee and L. Xu. CUBIC: A New TCP-Friendly High-Speed TCP Variant. PFLDNet, 2005.
• 24: K. Scott and S. Burleigh. Bundle Protocol Specification. IETF Draft, draft-irtf-dtnrgbundle-spec-01. txt, October, 2003.
• 25: Alex C. Snoeren , Hari Balakrishnan, An end-to-end approach to host mobility, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.155-166, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345938]
• 26: A. Vahdat and D. Becker. Epidemic routing for partially connected ad hoc networks. Technical Report CS-200006, Duke University, April 2000.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.0 General

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
adaptive middleware, architecture, delay-tolerant networking