Opportunistic information distribution in challenged networks

Mobile nodes in some challenging network scenarios suffer from intermittent connectivity and frequent partitions e.g. battlefield and disaster recovery scenarios. Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) technologies are designed to enable nodes in such environments to communicate with one another. Several DTN routing schemes have been proposed. In order for the DTN technology to be useful, enhancements need to be made to legacy applications e.g. emails, web browsers, instant messaging etc to enable such applications to work over DTNs. In this paper, we present a DTN Jabber proxy which we have developed to allow mobile devices to run Jabber applications over DTN. Our proxy can identify group chat messages which enable our prototype to perform last mile multicast and hence minimize the wireless bandwidth usage.