Where the Network ends: Infrastructure and Delay Tolerant Networks in a Hybrid Future Internet

Traffic carried by mobile networks doubles per year, resulting in congestion and high cost for network upgrades. With the widespread integration of sensing devices with the Internet—in the so-called “Internet of Things”—infrastructurebased networks are becoming an increasingly expensive way of keeping up with communication needs due to the high volume of sensing data. Delay Tolerant Networks provide new communication possibilities for the transport of sensing data, as they allow for communication without any infrastructure—based on mobileto-mobile communication and store-carry-forward mechanisms. Performing a cooperative hybrid approach of today’s networks with DTNs has empirically shown to be promising, but is scarcely understood. In this talk we give an overview on our work in hybrid networks, based on overlay networks and Delay Tolerant Networks. Our approach allows for the integration of opportunistic mobileto-mobile communication with partial infrastructure access to inexpensively route delay-tolerant data.