Technical Summary
Since the publication of the Bundle Protocol Specification
(Experimental RFC 5050) in 2007, the Delay-Tolerant Networking
Bundle Protocol has been implemented in multiple programming
languages and deployed to a wide variety of computing platforms.
This implementation and deployment experience has identified
opportunities for making the protocol simpler, more capable,
and easier to use. The present document, standardizing the
Bundle Protocol (BP), is adapted from RFC 5050 in that context.
This document describes version 7 of BP.
Delay Tolerant Networking is a network architecture providing
communications in and/or through highly stressed environments.
Stressed networking environments include those with intermittent
connectivity, large and/or variable delays, and high bit error
rates. To provide its services, BP may be viewed as sitting at
the application layer of some number of constituent networks,
forming a store-carry-forward overlay network. Key capabilities
of BP include:
- Ability to use physical mobility for the movement of data
- Ability to move the responsibility for error control from
one node to another
- Ability to cope with intermittent connectivity, including
cases where the sender and receiver are not concurrently
present in the network
- Ability to take advantage of scheduled, predicted, and
opportunistic connectivity, whether bidirectional or
unidirectional, in addition to continuous connectivity
- Late binding of overlay network endpoint identifiers to
underlying constituent network addresses
Working Group Summary
The document is the core specification for the WG and have
received significant review and feedback from the participants.
At the end of the process there was quite some discussion around
this document obsoleting RFC 5050. Which both required new
process between IETF and IRTF stream manager as well as being
decided with a rough consensus.
Document Quality
Multiple interoperable implementations of [RFC5050] have been
deployed in significant ongoing experiments for many years.
At the time of this writing, the only known implementation of
the current document is microPCN (https://upcn.eu/).
Personnel
Document Shepherd: Fred L. Templin (fred.l.templin@boeing.com)
Responsible Area Director: Magnus Westerlund (magnus.westerlund@ericsson.com)