A comparative simulation of opportunistic routing protocols using realistic mobility data obtained from mass events

Large crowds at music festivals or other mass events create challenging environments for traditional infrastructure based wireless networks. Mobile devices carried by the attendees produce large amounts of network traffic that can result in network outage or serious delays. Opportunistic networks may offer solutions to enable communication between attendees and/or organizers through direct communication between devices, without requiring a fixed infrastructure. In previous work, researchers have developed numerous opportunistic routing protocols designed to enable communication in such ad hoc networks. In this paper, several of these protocols are evaluated for the specific use case of a music festival by running simulations that make use of realistic mobility data collected during an international music festival. This analysis allows for identification of candidate routing protocols that exhibit properties that make them suitable for the envisaged scenario. The goal is to narrow down the set of candidate protocols and to eventually fine tune them to optimize their working. Based on the simulations, we propose two candidate routing protocols that are most suited for use at mass events.