Disruption-Tolerant Networking: A Comprehensive Survey on Recent Developments and Persisting Challenges

Nowadays, wireless networks are witnessing several deployments in various extreme environments where they suffer from different levels of link disruptions depending on the severity of the operating conditions. In all cases, their operation requirements are differently altered and their performance is negatively affected rendering them heterogeneous by nature. In the open literature, these networks are known as Intermittently Connected Networks (ICNs). The existing Internet protocols fail to operate properly in the context of ICNs, thus raising a variety of new challenging problems that are attracting the attention of the networking research community. Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networking emerged as a highly active area of research where networking experts compete in addressing the various ICN problems. Over time, unicast routing, one of the architectural key components common to all ICNs, became an almost independent field of research in which significant efforts continue to be invested. In contrast, network architectural designs, scheduling and forwarding issues dating from the early days of Inter-Planetary Networks (IPNs) have received relatively little attention and accumulate numerous pending challenges. Moreover, the gap caused by the lack of accurate ICN mathematical models is still large irrespective of some of the appreciated seminal works in this direction. This paper sheds the light over the latest advancements in each of the above-mentioned research sectors and highlight pending open issues in each of them.