Always Best (dis-)Connected: Challenges to Interconnect Highly Heterogeneous Networks

Wireless networks enable mobility, multihoming, and Delay Tolerant Networks. In such networking environments, the principles of the Internet, i.e., the end-to-end principle and the combination of location and identification in IP addresses, cannot be applied. In this paper, we propose a scalable application centric approach for mobility and multihoming that is able to interconnect highly heterogeneous networks where the networks may belong to different networking paradigms, e.g., IP based and Delay Tolerant Networks. Applications and users that aim to communicate, form communities. Community members might together have several network technologies available, and the community layer manages internetworking information for the members to seamlessly integrate these. Networking adaptation layers are used to provide a common interface for the different networks to the community layer. Addressing is based on names, cryptographic identifiers, and network locators and such that identifiers can also be created in infrastructure-less and disconnected situations.