Bundle Protocol Erasure Coding Extension
draft-irtf-dtnrg-zinky-erasure-coding-extension-00

Abstract

This document describes an extension to the Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) Bundle Protocol specification [RFC5050] which describes a protocol that enables the transfer of relatively large Data Objects over disrupted networks. The Erasure Coding Extension is a mechanism that extends the ability of the existing DTN bundle fragmentation mechanism to handle situations where bundles have a high probability of being dropped. An example use case is a situation where no communication contact period will ever be long enough to send the whole Data Object. In this case the object must be partitioned into smaller chunks and these chunks are sent in multiple bundles. The Erasure Coding Extension provides a recovery mechanism that allows many of these bundles to be dropped and still allow the whole Data Object to be successfully sent. This document describes an Erasure Coding Extension Block and a framework for integrating Forward Error Correction (FEC) into the bundle protocol. The Erasure Coding Extension is designed to support multiple FEC schemes and content object types. This is the framework document for a series of documents about erasure coding for DTN. Companion documents describe specific FEC schemes [RandBinary] and specific Data Object types [EcObjects].

Authors

John Zinky
Armando L. Caro
Gregory Stein

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