Delay-Tolerant Networking is a network architecture providing communications in and/or
through highly stressed environments. Stressed networking environments include those
with intermittent connectivity, large and/or variable delays, and high bit error rates. To
provide its services, BP may be viewed as sitting at the application layer of some number
of constituent networks, forming a store-carry-forward overlay network. Key capabilities
of BP include:
• Ability to use physical motility for the movement of data.
• Ability to move the responsibility for error control from one node to another.
• Ability to cope with intermittent connectivity, including cases where the sender and
receiver are not concurrently present in the network.
• Ability to take advantage of scheduled, predicted, and opportunistic connectivity,
whether bidirectional or unidirectional, in addition to continuous connectivity.
• Late binding of overlay-network endpoint identifiers to underlying constituent
network addresses