On using P2P technology to enable opportunistic management in DTNs through statistical estimation

Abstract —Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are charac-terized by long delays and constant disconnections among nodes.These networks have management needs analogous to those oftraditional computer networks, but, their intrinsic characteristics( e.g. , intermittent connections) hinder the execution of networkmanagement tasks. The employment of P2P technology is analternative for managing DTNs since this technology promotesthe autonomy of management entities ( i.e. , management peers).This autonomy enables the use of local logic and data in order toperform opportunistic management tasks. We propose a solutionto estimate the future contacts of nodes through distributedstatistical analysis of past contacts. Besides that, nodes can shareinformation about their contacts to improve contact estimationusing a P2P management overlay. The proposed solution wasimplemented using an open source P2P-Based Network Manage-ment (P2PBNM) system, ManP2P-ng. Furthermore, the solutionwas evaluated through experiments performed using publiclyavailable DTN traces. The results show that the proposed solutioncan improve the execution of management tasks in DTNs.