From delay-tolerant networks to vehicular delay-tolerant networks

© 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis paper provides an introductory overview of Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks. First, an introduction to Delay-Tolerant Networks and Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks is given. Delay-Tolerant schemes and protocols can help in situations where network connectivity is sparse or with large variations in density, or even when there is no end-to-end connectivity by providing a communications solution for non real-time applications. Some special issues like routing are addressed in the paper and an introductory description of applications and the most important projects is given. Finally, some research challenges are discussed and conclusions are detailed.This work was supported in part by the Instituto de Telecomunicações Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, in the framework of the VDTN@Lab Project, by the Euro-NF Network of Excellence of the Seventh Framework Programme of EU, in the framework of the VDTN Project, by the MPSat project (FCT Ref. PTDC/EEA-TEL/099074/2008) as well as by national funding from FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (INESC-ID multiannual funding) through the PIDDAC program funds and through the PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2011 project.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft