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Networking for challenged environments, or Delay-and Disruption-Tolerant Networking as it is now most commonly referred to, has attracted great attention in the past few years by the networking research community. Connectivity disruptions, limited network capacity, energy and storage constraints of the participating, mobile devices and the arbitrary movement of nodes are only a few of the challenges that the protocol stack has to deal with. Clearly, current Internet protocols (ie, the TCP/IP protocol stack) suffer and can fail under such conditions.

In this paper, we initially give the DTN Problem Statement; we contend that not all applications have the same requirements from the system and hence, equal (blind) treatment of all data packets will result in reduced network efficiency. Based on that we propose a Design Position for DTN protocols, which states that protocol design has to be done proactively, on the basis of the application’s requirements.