A survey of routing and data dissemination in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have practical applications in various fields. DTNs have been studied in-depth by many researchers and multiple high quality survey papers have been produced which analyzes DTN features, taxonomies, and applications. In recent years, interest in DTN research has rekindled as there are several emerging network-based application domains that require delay tolerance support and thus can use DTN specific routing and data dissemination techniques. Examples of such novel areas are Information Centric Network (ICN), Mobile ICN, Named Data Network (NDN), Internet of Things (IoT), etc. In this paper, we have surveyed those applications briefly and have proposed an alternate taxonomy for classifying existing DTN routing algorithms. The objective of this survey is to help future researchers to identify DTN specific properties in the new applications and to apply appropriate routing protocols whenever necessary. We have studied the relation between message replication and individual or group communication semantics of DTN routing protocols considering both social-based and opportunistic message forwarding techniques. We have also introduced an in-depth coverage of data dissemination protocols in DTN which can be adapted to content-centric networking domains. We conclude our survey by identifying a set of open challenges for future researchers.