Routing of encrypted contents over Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN)

Demand for network communications is increasing everyday but developing regions do not have the appropriate network connectivity. These networks are characterized by lengthy link outages, high error rates and long latencies. The solution is Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) in which the higher network layer leverages on the underlying topology stability. The purpose of this project is to develop a mail application that is able to switch between mail delivery by TCP/IP or DTN, depending on the efficiency of the TCP/IP mechanism. The network traffic will be encrypted by IPSec tunnel. By encapsulating the entire datagram including its headers, confidentiality, authenticity and integrity will not be compromised. The IPSec tunnel is set up between cloud servers since NAT does not allow traffic to be tunneled. Simple network traffic analysis is carried out to verify the contents of the network packet. The mail application is developed with internal logic to switch between the 2 mail delivery methods but it is not able to work on the servers due to the limitation of the SSH connections. Despite having several constraints to the project, the application logic and development of the IPSec tunnel is sound and the development of this project could be continued with the appropriate resources. It is recommended that future research work could be focused on evaluating the performance of the encrypted data transfer in a DTN testbed comprising DTN-enabled routers between DTN nodes.Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering