A Multi-Interface DTN-like Communication System

Abstract:
The networking industry is quickly adopting IP as the technology to run all the communication applications people need. Yet, there exists a lot of use cases and deployments, where end-to-end IP is not available. This is the domain Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is targeting. The Multi Interface Communications Software (MICS) is a robust DTN-like messaging platform for heterogeneous communications equipment. MICS can provide message delivery in networks that lack essentials required by traditional TCP/IP-solutions, like end-to-end connectivity or compatible addressing methods. MICS abstracts the used communications medium, that is the network and link layer, from applications. Applications and network interfaces connect to MICS core using well known and standardized APIs. Familiar email addresses and APIs are used to interface applications with the MICS system. The high-level operation of MICS resembles DTN since we make use of store-and-forward message delivery and multipath message routing together with flooding. This paper concentrates on the overall concept of the MICS system, software architecture, IPC methods, details design choices, message routing and discusses real world deployment scenarios.