THE VIABILITY OF A DTN SYSTEM FOR CURRENT MILITARY APPLICATION

Abstract

With DTN technology in development we see the DARPA Disruption-Tolerant Networking program and the DTN Research Group making significant strides toward disruption-tolerant network infrastructure. Mobile ad-hoc networks are a topic of interest in the military today due to the flexibility of the network to expand and contract continuously and remain consistent in a highly changing environment. The primary research question in this thesis is the viability of the SPINDLE Disruption-Tolerant Networking software developed for field deployment in the United States Marine Corps. My research evaluates the usability of the BBN SPINDLE BPA for deployment. In this paper, I discuss what is required to learn, install, and configure the BBN software while evaluating how stable the software performs. It explores the question of if it is feasible to add an ICMP notification service for applications whose traffic has been diverted due to the DTN process. The tests conducted demonstrate two possible methods to use ICMP messages in a network to convey unique DTN messages to individual hosts. It demonstrates how a known ICMP message type can be utilized to carry message flags representing explicit network disruption notifications in applications designed to recognize them.