Although several years have passed since its first introduction, the significance of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) remains evident, particularly in challenging environments where traditional networks face operational limitations such as disrupted communication or high latency. This survey paper aims to explore the diverse array of applications where DTN technologies have proven successful, with a focus on emerging and novel application paradigms. In particular, we focus on the contributions of DTN in the Future Internet, including its contribution to space applications, smart cities and the Internet of Things, but also to underwater communications. We also discuss its potential to be used jointly with information-centric networks to change the internet communication paradigm in the future.

We present deep-space transport protocol (DS- TP), a new reliable protocol for deep-space communication links. DS-TP's main advantage is its ability to complete file transfers faster than conventional TCP, SCPS-TP and Saratoga. Therefore, missions with small connectivity time are greatly favored. Deep space communication links are characterized by long propagation delays, high BERs, intermittent connectivity (i.e., blackouts) and bandwidth asymmetries. Common approaches to deal with the above unique characteristics are: rate-based, open-loop protocols to deal with huge propagation delays; regular retransmissions to deal with high BERs; transmission suspension to deal with blackouts; SNACKs to deal with bandwidth asymmetries. We adopt some of the above approaches, namely, the open-loop, rate-based transmission and the SNACKs and focus on the optimization of the rest, namely, the retransmission strategy of the transport protocol to deal either with high BERs or with blackouts. More precisely, DS-TP includes the Double Automatic Retransmission (DAR) technique. DAR sends each packet twice, importing some intentional delay (R_d) between the original transmission and the retransmission. Therefore, in the presence of communication gaps (i.e., errors or blackouts), corrupted packets will eventually be replaced by the same correct packets that arrive with delay R_d. R_d, however, is much smaller than the traditional TCP-RTO value. Our theoretical performance evaluation results reveal that DS-TP presents high potential for deploy ability. In particular, we show that for PER=50%, DS-TP completes a file transfer in half time of a conventional protocol.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has arisen as an architectural solution that responds to the needs of today’s overloaded Internet, departing from the traditional host-centric access paradigm. In this paper we focus on Named Data Networking (NDN), the most prominent ICN architecture. In the NDN framework, disseminated content is at the core of the design and providing trusted content is essential. In this paper, we provide an overview of reputation-based trust approaches, present their design trade-offs and argue that these approaches can consolidate NDN trust and security by working complementary to the existing credential-based schemes. Finally, we discuss future research directions and challenges.

Software-defined wireless mesh networks are being increasingly deployed in diverse settings, such as smart cities and public Wi-Fi access infrastructures. The signal propagation and interference issues that typically characterize these environments can be handled by employing SDN controller mechanisms, effectively monitoring link quality and triggering appropriate mitigation strategies, such as adjusting link and/or routing protocols. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised machine learning (ML) online framework for link quality detection consisting of: 1) improved preprocessing clustering algorithm, based on elastic similarity measures, to efficiently characterize wireless links in terms of reliability, and 2) a novel change point (CP) detector for the real-time identification of anomalies in the quality of selected links, which minimizes the overestimation error through the incorporation of a rank-based test and a recursive max-type procedure. In this sense, considering the communication constraints of such environments, our approach minimizes the detection overhead and the inaccurate decisions caused by overestimation. The proposed detector is validated, both on its individual components and as an overall mechanism, against synthetic but also real data traces; the latter being extracted from real wireless mesh network deployments.