Workshop on the Emergence of Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networks (E-DTN)

October, 2009, St.-Petersburg, Russia
(in conjunction with ICUMT 2009)

Networking research for challenged environments has attracted
a lot of attention lately. Numerous attractive protocols have
been proposed, which are expected to network places and devices that
currently do not have the opportunity of “going online”. Such
environments reside at the edges of the current Internet infrastructure.
For example, public and private transport vehicles, underwater, satellite and
deep-space networks are potential DTN deployments of interest.
Communication in the above-mentioned challenged environments is usually
infrastructureless and consists mainly of mobile battery-powered
devices. Moreover, mobility patterns are usually unknown, making
connectivity periods between DTN-nodes intermittent and opportunistic.
To achieve communication in such environments one has to deal with
several performance tradeoffs, such as end-to-end delivery delay and
energy consumption, or reliability and storage congestion.
Since, in most cases, end-to-end connectivity does not exist (hence the
difference from ad hoc networking) current Internet protocols
fail permanently.

Although there have already been a lot of research proposals for
routing, (storage) congestion control, error control and
application design for such networks, the IRTF has
focused mainly on the Bundle Protocol (BP); BP is an application
layer protocol that does not include the appropriate functionalities to
deal with issues such as routing or storage congestion, for example. That
said, DTN research and its future directions seem to lack a stable
basis. For example, it is not clear yet if a “one-fits-all” protocol
stack will be deployed, or if such an approach is feasible at all.
In contrast, several different protocols that each would suit the needs
of its specific architecture/setup would need to be able to interoperate.

This workshop seeks novel ideas in the form of preliminary or work-in-progress
results as well as mature research papers for Delay-/Disruption
Tolerant Networks. We also encourage position papers that address and criticize the past, current
and future trends of DTN research and are intended to trigger discussions on the
whole spectrum of DTNs. Topics include but are not limited to:

* DTN Routing
* Congestion and Storage Congestion Control
* Resource Sharing in DTN environments
* Network Coding techniques for DTNs
* Application Development
* DTN Management Platforms
* Error and Flow Control
* Experiences and Measurements from DTN testbeds
* Privacy and Security of Information in DTNs
* DTN Simulators and related tools
* Performance Evaluation and Metrics for DTN Research
* Performance and Design Tradeoffs for DTN Algorithms and Protocols
* Social Networking through DTNs
* Satellite Constellations and DTNs
* Naming/Addressing and interoperability issues with the Internet architecture
* DTN Architectures:
o Satellite Communications
o Deep-space Communications
o Underwater Communications
o Connectivity in Developing Countries
o Communication in Public and Private Transport Vehicles

A selection of the best papers will be invited for a special issue on the Emergence of Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networks in the Journal of Internet Engineering.

Important Dates:

Abstract-registration Deadline: June 15, 2009
Paper-submission Deadline: June 20, 2009
Acceptance Notification: July 31, 2009