@article{13881, keywords = {Aggregation, Delay Tolerant Networking, Duplicate suppression, End-to-end reliability, In-order delivery, Transport protocol}, author = {Georgios Papastergiou and Ioannis Alexiadis and Scott Burleigh and Vassilis Tsaoussidis}, title = {Delay Tolerant Payload Conditioning Protocol}, abstract = {Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture is a new communication architecture developed to provide network connectivity in challenging environments. It forms a store-and-forward overlay network that employs persistent storage to deal with link disconnections. Consistent with its store-and-forward requirements, the design of the transport function of the DTN architecture was primarily based on hop-by-hop operations in preference to the traditional end-to-end communication model. As a result, pure end-to-end functionality is absent from the current DTN architecture and thus has been shifted towards applications. In this study, we highlight the benefits of having an additional layer of application-independent protocol offering transparent application data conditioning services end-to-end and we introduce Delay Tolerant Payload Conditioning (DTPC) protocol, a novel protocol that realizes this layer. DTPC protocol is an expandable, connectionless, reliable, sequenced transport protocol which extends the DTN architecture in a fashion that accords with the end-to-end principle, enabling the following services: (a) application data aggregation, (b) application-level reliability, (c) in-order delivery, and (d) duplicate suppression. DTPC was integrated into the JPL{\textquoteright}s Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) DTN reference implementation, and its functionality was evaluated/validated through real-time experiments in a DTN testbed.}, year = {2014}, journal = {Computer Networks}, volume = {59}, pages = {244{\textendash}263}, month = {02/2014}, publisher = {Elsevier North-Holland, Inc.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bjp.2013.11.003}, doi = {10.1016/j.bjp.2013.11.003}, }