DTN: Upgrading Martian Carrier Pigeons

In various environments randing from a small lake with probes that measure the quality of the water to soldiers running around on the battle field and Vger floating through outer space, there is a need for these entities to communicate with each other.

The field that covers this is called Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). DTN's solve the problems with TCP, when e.g. connection simply would time out as light doesn't go faster than light, or when there is no direct connection possible at all for the next week or two. Other cases, like mentioned above might cause nodes to be off at certain times to conserve battery time, or simply because they maintain radio silence so that the enemy can't find them.

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), which is the Research arm of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is trying to solve this riddle by providing alternative means of communications for these kinds of networks. Their current proposal are the Bundle and Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) protocols. The Bundle protocol is on the same layer as IP, while LTP covers the layer that TCP used to take. Bundle handles the routing of packets from A to B, taking care of security, delay metrics and congestion. LTP make it possible to actually send full messages between A and B.

This talk will cover the various scenario's that DTN's are used in, how Bundle and LTP work in detail and lastly also how to deploy it in an efficient and secure manner, being able to upgrade all of your nodes in one go without worries with semi viral methods.

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