Mitigating naval network instabilities with disruption toler

We describe an approach to improving network performance in networks with heterogeneous links - for example, a communications network constructed from satellite links, airborne relays, and line-of-site radios - using disruption tolerant networking. DTN defines an overlay network that uses storage at each hop to make end-to-end communications resilient to delay, loss, network disruption, temporary network partitioning, and congestion. DTN further improves performance by allowing separate transport layers at each hop of the overlay that can be tuned for the local network environments. We present recent work interfacing one such transport layer, the NACK oriented reliable multicast (NORM) protocol, to DTN; performance experiments from tactical radios; and simulation results based on models of deployed systems.