Augmented reality (AR) systems for situational
awareness (SA) depend on low-latency networking to deliver alerts, map overlays and sensor feeds. However, contested environments exhibit intermittent connectivity and high
packet loss due to jamming, interference and terrain occlusions. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) strategies, notably
store–carry–forward routing, have been shown to enable data
delivery when end-to-end paths do not exist[1]. This paper introduces DTN-AR, a DTN-ready AR SA framework that combines a
store–carry–forward overlay with edge caching on relay devices
to keep mission utilities high even with 60–90 % packet loss.
We implement a prototype using mobile relays and AR glasses
and evaluate it under emulated jamming, delay spikes and link
failures. Experiments show that DTN-AR maintains a situational
awareness score within 5 % of baseline when 70 % of packets are
dropped and keeps staleness below 4 s at 90 % loss. Our results
suggest that DTN strategies are essential for network-degraded
operations.