Bundling the Web: HTTP over DTN

Mobile users traveling by car, bus, or train usually experience varying connectivity characteristics while they are on their way, including unpredictable (loss of) network access, changes in a data rate, and the like. In short, they operate in a challenged networking environment that is not well suited for many Internet applications. While different approaches have been developed to specifically mitigate (short-term) disconnections while at least partly preserving the end-to-end notion of such applications, Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) takes a different approach by relying exclusively on asynchronous communications. While this fits well with the mobile user connectivity, particularly interactive applications (such as web access) are affected by the lack of synchronous end-to-end interaction. In this paper, we present protocol mechanisms for running HTTP-over-DTN as well as a system architecture for incremental deployment, and we report on findings from measurements performed with our prototype implementation.