Testbed-based performance evaluation of routing protocols for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

As an application of the concept of delay-tolerant network (DTN) for vehicular communications, the vehicular delay-tolerant network (VDTN) architecture was proposed to cope with issues, such as highly dynamic network topology, short contact durations, disruption, intermittent connectivity, variable node density, and frequent network fragmentation. These challenging characteristics of vehicular networks affect the design and performance of routing protocols. This paper presents a testbed performance evaluation of DTN-based routing protocols applied to VDTNs. The objective is to evaluate and understand how popular routing strategies perform in sparse or partitioned opportunistic vehicular network scenarios. It was observed that Spray and Wait routing protocol outperforms all other protocols considered in the study.