According to an embodiment, a method includes a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) software overlay residing in a first plane of a node of the network is used to define hierarchical forwarding behavior for data being generated in the first plane. In a second plane of the network, local buffering and data retransmission is performed in response to at least one intermittent network outage. Communication between the first and second planes is performed to manage the transmission of data between the first and second planes as needed in the event of at network outage that is longer in duration than the at least one intermittent network outage, to thus prevent the loss of data.