On the applicability of reliable transport protocols in satellite delay tolerant and disruptive networks

Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is an emerging technology introduced for deep-space communications to address both very large propagation delay or link disruptions. The DTN paradigm results promising in several satellitebased scenarios where either physical or service interruption might be experienced. This paper focuses on a set of selected satellite-based scenarios, where the DTN paradigm adoption greatly improves the unicast and multicast communications' performance with limited costs in terms of both software add-ons and architectural modifications.