I am seeking a mechanism for reliable delivery of large blobs through a network of occasionally-connected hosts that can forward the blobs using available transport protocols.
I can't find it, though. Most of the networking materials I can find deal more with immediate-transmission networks, where the destination host is reachable at the instant that the source host transmits. (This isn't a catenet.)
You could take a look at how networks of IRC servers or Usenet servers manage to remain connected or manage to push articles around even when large chunks of intermediate networks fail, or you could use some fancy mail routeing system and treat your blobs as email. Do the blobs have specific destinations (think Email), and even if they do is it acceptable for the blobs to also be delivered to every other host on your network (think Usenet) ? (In other words, you might need to look a couple of layers up from the network layer to get a good result on this one.) Regards, Andrew -- Andrew Bangs, Network Architecture, ScottishTelecom andrewb@demon.net