Introduction

In July of 2010, a computer scientist named Stephen Farrell found himself in a remote Swedish village just north of the Arctic Circle. Delay- or Disruption-tolerant (DTN) networking is an approach to networking architecture that is specifically designed for environments with intermittent connectivity. The origins of DTN can be traced back to 1973, when Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a research project at the Stanford Research Institute in California whose aim was to establish a radio network capable of transmitting packets of digital data. The interplanetary internet began when DARPA funded a small group of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to figure out how to apply a store-and-forward approach to networking in outer space. One of the biggest emerging DTN applications is the Internet of Things, a global network of embedded systems that range from everyday home appliances to industrial machines. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.