ProgDTN: Programmable Disruption-Tolerant Networking

Existing routing algorithms for disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) have two main limitations: (a) a particular DTN routing algorithm is typically designed to achieve very good performance in a specific scenario, but has limited performance in other scenarios, and (b) DTN routing algorithms do not take advantage of network programmability to profit from its benefits. We present ProgDTN, a novel approach to support programmable disruption-tolerant networking by allowing network operators to implement and adapt routing algorithms without knowledge of a router's interior workings using the popular JavaScript language. To consider the specific properties of a particular application scenario, network operators can incorporate context information of DTN bundles and nodes in their routing algorithms. ProgDTN is based on DTN7, a flexible and efficient open-source, platform-independent implementation of the Bundle Protocol version 7. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that using ProgDTN to tailor a routing algorithm to a particular scenario achieves excellent results of up to 99.9% delivery ratio while reducing unnecessary transmissions by 92.9%. ProgDTN's implementation, our tailored scenario-specific routing algorithm, and code/data fragments for our experiments are released under permissive open-source licenses.