Disruption‐resilient bundle delivery mechanism in space DTNs with partial segments aggregation

Abstract

In space disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs), a cessation resulting from a sudden link failure may occur during bundle transfer, which could introduce additional delay and probably lead to inefficient exploiting of precious successive contacts with current version of typical bundle protocol. Although the DTN architecture provides a preliminary idea – bundle reactive fragmentation to alleviate these problems, both it and the relevant works involve little on the modification to packet format, which supports fragmentation and reassembly. Moreover, most studies in the context of reactive fragmentation bases on a premise that routing header is received before connection breakdown, which would lack generality. In this study, without the premise, the author propose an expedited mechanism with specific packet format's modification to handle an unexpected disruption, through which extra waiting-time for recovery of the interrupted transfer could be efficiently avoided and thus achieving fast forwarding at intermediate node. The simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce bundle delivery time, without introducing significant extra overheads with the respect of the well-defined metric of wasted transmission effort.