Enabling opportunistic storage for mobile DTNs

Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) can enable ad-hoc communication within (sparse) mobile user communities and multi-hop Internet access where IP-based end-to-end communication would fail. DTN message forwarding in ad-hoc networks may lead to message replication and messages remaining stored on several nodes for some time. We leverage these characteristics and provide application support in intermediate nodes: we enable them to understand the resources contained in forwarded and locally stored DTN messages to perform application-specific processing. Based upon this, we create an opportunistic distributed storage for cooperative content caching and retrieval using the nodes’ buffers.