Design considerations in applying disruption tolerant networking to tactical edge networks

In recent years there has been a strong desire in the U.S. Department of Defense to augment traditional ground and satellite communications with a high capacity aerial tier. High capacity airborne links are often directional in nature and highly affected by aircraft body blockage, exhibiting unique outage characteristics compared to ground or satellite networks. To mitigate the effects of periodic link outages that last seconds to minutes, disruption tolerant networking (DTN) technology has been proposed. In this article we examine applying the DTN Bundle Protocol (RFC 5050) to ship-to-shore networks for traffic flowing over the aerial nodes. Specifically, we examine applying DTN proxies, tunnels, and interfaces to both the plaintext and ciphertext side of military networks to understand architecture and design considerations and limitations.