Reliable content delivery using persistent data sessions in a highly mobile environment

Abstract

Special Forces are crucial in specific military operations. They usually operate in hostile territory where communications are difficult to establish and preserve, since the operations are often carried out in a remote environment and the communications need to be highly mobile. The delivery of information about the geographical parameters of the area can be crucial for the completion of their mission. But in that highly mobile environment, the connectivity of the established wireless networks (LANs) can be unstable and intermittently unavailable. Existing content transfer protocols are not adaptive to volatile network connectivity. If a physical connection is lost, any information or part of a file already retrieved is discarded and the same information must be retransmitted again after the reestablishment of the lost session. The intention of this Thesis is to develop a protocol in the application layer that preserves the already transmitted part of the file, and when the session is reestablished, the information server can continue sending the rest of the file to the requesting host. Further, if the same content is available from another server through a better route, the new server should be able to continue to serve the content, starting from where the session with the previous server ended.