Secure Multidestination Delivery in DTN

There are currently no provisions in the Bundle Protocol for multidestination delivery of bundle payloads. Ideally, however, a multicast delivery capability inherent to DTN will eventually be defined, complete with a DTN multicast group management protocol to enable the formation of DTN multicast groups, the association of each group with a DTN multicast group address, and the ability to add and remove DTN endpoints from these multicast groups. A native DTN multicast capability will also require the definition of a DTN multicast routing protocol to enable each DTN router to determine on which interfaces a bundle destined for a multicast group address should be forwarded. While such a native DTN multicast capability is desirable, its definition does not seem imminent. In the meantime, before all the components necessary for such a full-scale native DTN multicast capability are in place, it has been proposed that the DTN Bundle Protocol be modified with the optional ability to provide a modified form of multicast, which we will call "multidestination delivery". Multidestination delivery can conserve DTN bandwidth by ensuring that a given payload sent from a single source traverses each link of the DTN at most once, no matter how many destinations to which the payload is addressed.