History of Delay-tolerant Networking

The history of delay-tolerant networking examines the bulk of the technologies that began the field that is known today as delay-tolerant networking. Research began as projects under United States government grants relating to the necessity of networking technologies that can sustain the significant delays and packet corruption of space travel. Initially, these projects looked only short-range communication between manned missions to the moon and back, but the field quickly expanded into an entire sub-field of DTNs that created the technological advances to allow for the Interplanetary Internet.

In the 1970s, spurred by the micronization of computing, researchers began developing technology for routing between non-fixed locations of computers. While the field of ad-hoc routing was inactive throughout the 1980s, the widespread use of wireless protocols reinvigorated the field in the 1990s as mobile ad-hoc routing and vehicular ad-hoc networking became areas of increasing interest.

With the growing interest in mobile ad-hoc routing and the increasing complexity of the Interplanetary Internet, the 2000s (decade) brought about a growing number of academic conferences on delay and disruption-tolerant networking. This field saw many optimizations on classic ad-hoc and delay-tolerant networking algorithms and began to examine factors such as security, reliability, verifiability, and other areas of research that are well understood in traditional computer networking.