DTN over aerial carriers

Delay-tolerant Networking has been discussed for mobile environments, both with predictable (e.g., between buses) and unpredictable opportunistic (e.g., between people) contact schedules. While some research projects have envisioned the larger scale use of DTNs to perform message forwarding based upon social interactions between humans, the geographic dimension of simulations has mostly been limited to rather local areas such as (parts of) cities or modestly sized areas covered by public transportation. In this paper, we explore how messages could be carried over a realistic large scale global network, between airports based upon scheduled flight connections. We investigate the interaction with different routing protocols, the impact of scheduling uncertainties, and the limiting factors by means of simulations and analysis. While we do not consider in depth the integration of aerial-carrier-based DTN message delivery into regional and local social networks, we provide some initial approximation on this subject and discuss some potential roles for message forwarding based upon mass transportation.