Disruption-Tolerant Routing With Scoped Propagation of Control Information

The authors consider the problem of routing messages through a network with episodic connectivity without a priori knowledge of node schedules or locations. They present Steward Assisted Routing (StAR), an efficient loop-free routing framework that can operate in networks that are well-connected as well as in networks that exhibit intermittent connectivity; the proposed protocol uses steward nodes to deliver data to destinations that may be partitioned from the source. They also introduce a companion protocol, Scoped Contact and Interest Propagation (SCIP), which contains mechanisms with which dissemination of routing control information for destinations of interest is scoped to a well-defined region of the network.