Distributed Fallback Networks (DFNs) #

Distributed fallback networks are communication networks that rely on technologies that do not have the single points of failure associated with traditional networks.

DFNs supplement or replace network connectivity to re-enable applications in times of crisis when centralized, high-bandwidth conventional networks go down. The tradeoff with such a decentralized network is reduced bandwidth, higher latencies, and reduced network stability. Therefore, rather than optimizing for high performance, the goal of a DFN is to enable the efficient movement of small amounts of data across a loosely coordinated network for which the topology is not known.

If there exists a path between a source and destination through a DFN, the participant nodes in the network should be able to find that path with minimal communication overhead.