ABSTRACT

The initial standardization effort came out of the Internet Research Task Force's Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG). The first specifications were RFC 4838 for Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture and RFC 5050 for the bundle protocol. This chapter provides an overview of the available DTN implementations, which follow the reference implementation from the DTNRG. The Interplanetary Overlay Network software distribution is an implementation of DTN architecture. A DTN implementation intended to function in an interplanetary network environment - specifically, aboard interplanetary research spacecraft separated from Earth and from one another by vast distances - must operate successfully within two general classes of design constraints: link constraints and processor constraints. A small number of network operation design elements - fragmentation and reassembly, bandwidth management, and delivery assurance - can potentially be addressed at multiple layers of the protocol stack, possibly in different ways for different reasons.