Evaluating the impact of energy consumption on routing performance in delay tolerant networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are sparse wireless networks where most of the time there does not exist a complete path from the source node to the destination node. In this context, where connectivity is intermittent, but where the possibility of communication is still desirable, conventional routing protocols are unsuitable to deliver messages between nodes. The design of efficient routing protocols is a fundamental problem in DTNs. Many different routing approaches for DTNs have been proposed in the literature, each one based on different characteristics and properties. In most cases, their performance have been evaluated considering aspects like delivery ratio and delivery latency, without considering energy consumption constraint. In this work we focus on the energy consumption issues of the routing protocols. We present a performance comparison of the Epidemic, Spray and Wait, PROPHET, MaxProp and Bubble Rap routing protocols with respect to energy consumption, evaluating how the energy consumption impacts the performance of the protocols and how the different forwarding algorithms affect the energy usage in the mobile devices.