Comparison of DTN Routing Protocols in Realistic Scenario

Delay-, disruption-, and disconnection-tolerant networks (DTNs) implement the store-carry-forward (SCF) paradigm for message delivery, which can be used for data transmission when an end-to-end connection may never be reached. A number of SCF routing schemes have been developed to increase performance in various scenarios. In this paper, using the ONE Simulator, we investigate four SCF-based DTN routing protocols-Epidemic, MaxProp, ProphetV2, and Direct Oracle-by varying the number of created messages (message generating rate), the message size, the transmission range, and the transmission speed in scenarios that closely resemble the real-world practical situations that arise in developing regions. A performance evaluation based on the total size of delivery messages, delivery probability and overhead ratio is conducted, and the impact of the scenarios on the evaluation result is analyzed. While this investigation is in the preliminary stage, our observations reveal complex dependencies in performance on both scenario parameters and routing protocols, which motivate and will be essentially utilized to develop a means to adjust protocols dynamically by estimating and reflecting scenario parameters.