Opportunistic email distribution and access in challenged heterogeneous environments

Abstract

The communication paradigms for delay-tolerant networking have been modeled after email. Supporting email over DTNs in a backwards compatible manner in a heterogeneous environment has yet to be fully defined. In this paper, we present a set of conventions for and extensions to the DTNRG architecture. We have implemented a system that is able to deliver emails within a DTN network, from a DTN network to the Internet, and from the Internet to the DTN network. Our system architecture includes multiple solutions for integrating traditional and DTN-based mail delivery: DTN-based messaging clients for mobile phones and PDAs, a dedicated, standalone DTN gateway between the Internet and the DTN network, and a personal DTN mail application proxy. The latter bridges to unmodified mail user agents running on a laptop.

Reputation Aware Obfuscation for Mobile Opportunistic Networks

“…It waits for the tested node to perform the anonymisation and for the "friend"/"trusted" node to forward the result of the obfuscation back to it (line 16). After it receives the response it generates a value for the Reputation status of the tested node based on its opinion of the tested node performance, signs it digitally and stores the updated Reputation value onto the tested node (lines [17][18][19][20].…”

“…Underlying networking protocols [20], [14], [17], [33], [10], [16], [19], [30], [28], [27] increasingly provide support for large scale content sharing that utilize both opportunistic networks among mobile devices and connections to cellular network and access points when within their range.…”

“…An interest based citywide opportunistic content dissemination system has been studied in [16]. Various architectures for email delivery from Internet to and within an opportunistic networking domain were discussed in [17]. In [19] a scalable content dissemination system with dynamic content is discussed that exploits both infrastructure and opportunistic contacts.…”

A Survey of Opportunistic Networks

“…The drawback of this proxybased approach for SMTP protocol is that the proxy has to executes the entire SMTP protocol forwarding the information via the inter-proxy protocol. In [37], the authors describe an architecture to enable mail communication in a heterogeneous environment that combines traditional server-based mail delivery and opportunistic communications for different types of devices. In this architecture, mail messages are sent in bundles into the opportunistic network and carried toward a mail gateway (MWG).…”

Towards a Usenet-Like Discussion System for Users of Disconnected MANETs

“…Complementarily to papers addressing the development of communication protocols for disconnected MANETs, a few recent papers also discuss the design of applications capable of exploiting these protocols [12,13,14]. Indeed, the very characteristics of opportunistic, delay-tolerant communication imply that these applications must be able to tolerate asynchronous-and possibly fail-prone-transmissions.…”