MF-TCP : Design and evaluation of TCP for message ferry delay tolerant networks

In message ferry delay tolerant network, certain dedicated mobile nodes (message ferries) facilitate data transfer between disconnected regions of network. Message ferries travel around partitions of network, collecting data from nodes and delivering it to others. Due to high mobility of nodes and network partitioning, such a data transfer can be highly unreliable and it becomes really challenging to meet transport layer communication objectives. As we show, standard TCP performs poorly in such network because of frequent disconnections and longer propagation delays. In this paper, we present a variant of TCP (called MF-TCP) for message ferry delay tolerant networks which is designed to deal with high communication delays and significantly longer periods of disconnections. MF-TCP performs well even when intermediate nodes of TCP connections are highly mobile and round trip latency is unpredictable. Simulation results of MF-TCP show performance improvements over standard TCP in message ferry delay tolerant networks.