Delay-Tolerant Electronic Commerce

While some widely used network services, such as Internet telephony, clearly cannot function well in communication environments characterized by lengthy round-trip message exchange times, others such as electronic mail clearly can. This paper explores the proposition that electronic commerce might be supported effectively by Delay-Tolerant Networking over network infrastructure characterized by high transmission latencies. It is proposed, moreover, that such a delay-tolerant electronic commerce (DTEC) architecture could be commercially advantageous even over the Internet.