Delay Tolerant Network

The author argues the TCP has fundamental assumptions that are broken in "challenged" networks both in network characteristics and end point capabilities. Instead, the author proposes an architecture that is delay and link loss tolerant using a store and forward overlay to interconnect them.

I liked the ideas behind this paper and more importantly, the ideas in the paper have been in real deployments which is always a validation of the work. Although I am not sure if the rural areas are truly connected using this sort of technology. To have seamless transition from normal network to "challenged" network, the interface needs to be much more general. Most application written today rarely handle network failure gracefully, and to have these networks as functional as well connected networks, I believe network infrastructure is merely a first step. An application framework that makes failure handling explicit is also needed.