Managing Access Control in Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) Environment

The rapid growth in network heterogeneity, applications complexity, services and size due to increase number of users, have introduced more challenges in access control management in traditional networks. The emerging nature of Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) and its design assumptions like long delay, intermittent connectivity, asymmetric data rates etc make access control management even more challenging. The conflict of these assumptions with that of the Internet means the existing access control management systems can either not be implemented or implemented with modifications. The reference DTN environment includes but not limited to wireless, deep space and sensor-based networks. In this paper, our focus is on access control in DTN taking into consideration the long/variable delay, frequent disruption and heterogeneity. We proposed a framework that allows participating entities in the DTN environment to act as policy enforcers and also make independent access control decisions in the absence of connectivity. We present our proposed framework with description and analysis, and give direction for future work.