ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Disruption Tolerant Networking

Disruption tolerant networking is like playing with toys with your friend. When you're at home, you can play with your toys easily because you have all the toys you need in one place. But when you go to your friend's house, you might not have all your toys with you and your friend might not have the same toys as you.

Now imagine you and your friend want to play with a toy car together, but your friend doesn't have one. That's okay because you can take turns playing with it. Disruption tolerant networking is like that - it's a way for computers to communicate even if they don't have a good connection to each other all the time.

Sometimes, computers might not be able to talk to each other because of bad internet connections or because they are too far apart. But with disruption tolerant networking, the computers can store messages and send them later when they have a chance to talk to each other.

It's a bit like sneaking a note into your friend's pocket to read later. Even if you're not together all the time, you can still communicate with each other and share information. In the same way, computers that use disruption tolerant networking can send messages to each other even if they're not always connected to the internet.

Overall, disruption tolerant networking is like having a little secret stash of toys or notes that you can use to keep playing and communicating, even when things get a bit tricky.