Infrastructureless, Delay Tolerant Network in different Context: Internet of Things, Emergency, Mobile Social Networks, Pervasive Computing

Delay Tolerant Networks are a family of networks characterized by high and unpredictable node mobility. Examples can be a network formed by smartphones in your pockets, network of sensors (e.g. on cars on an highway), networks of "smart" domestic appliances, "smartdust", etc and a combination thereof.

The fact that the network topology is potentially highly dynamic introduces a number of relevant conditions:

• routing path between two endpoints changes frequently (and significantly) over time, making uneffective the classic routing protocol used e.g. in the Internet;
• the network can be disconnected: there can be two or more network partitions without connecting links, for a certain period of time. It might thus be impossible for to directly reach a destination;

Although the aforementioned elements significantly reduces the performances when compared to fixed networks, DTNs can be useful in situations where the normal infrastructure is not available (e.g. in the aftermath of an emergency, in rural areas, in case of infrastructure malfunctioning), when we would prefer to keep an information local or when the infrastructure can not be trusted.

DTN have been a research topic for several years and many protocols have been proposed. We think there is scope for further improvement and for use in real world cases. Information Centric Networking, a proposal that shift the paradigm from data location to data itself, embedding in the communication security, possibility to replicate content, better routing, could be a key element of the picture. IoT, Emergencies, Mobile social networks in proximity, pervasive computing, VANETS are only some of the fields that relate to dtn: you can come up with any other idea where dtn can be useful!