the term disruption-tolerant networking has gained currency in the United States due to support from DARPA, which has funded many DTN projects.
Disruption may occur because of the limits of wireless radio range, sparsity of mobile nodes, energy resources, attack, and noise.
Concurrently with (but separate from) the MANET activities, DARPA had funded NASA, MITRE and others to develop a proposal for the Interplanetary Internet (IPN).
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and others developed the initial IPN architecture, relating to the necessity of networking technologies that can cope with the significant delays and packet corruption of deep-space communications.
In many common problem spaces, this inefficiency is outweighed by the increased efficiency and shortened delivery times made possible by taking maximum advantage of available unscheduled forwarding opportunities.
In efforts to provide a shared framework for algorithm and application development in DTNs, RFC 4838 and 5050 were published in 2007 to define a common abstraction to software running on disrupted networks.
The service guarantees are generally set by the application level, and the RFC 5050 Bundle Protocol specification includes "bulk", "normal", and "expedited" markings.
In October 2014 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) instantiated a Delay Tolerant Networking working group to review and revise the protocol specified in RFC 5050.