The objective of Hermes is to take advantage of unutilized resources of commercial ISPs to deliver DTB data faster and cheaper than existing alternatives, including the postal system and dedicated high speed networks. To achieve its objective Hermes relies on:
- Multi-path forwarding, used for grabbing all the available bandwidth existing over different multi-hop paths at any given point in time, and
- Store-and-forward relaying, used for grabbing the maximum end-to-end capacity offered over a given multi-hop path over a time period of certain duration.
To perform store-and-forward, Hermes takes advantage of intermediate storage nodes participating in the system. Such nodes are used for temporarily buffering data in order to smooth out pricing and congestion problems appearing with end-to-end connections that terminate at end-points at different time zones.
Hermes is build as a software library offered to applications programmers that want to support DTB transfers.
