Developing and Evaluating Routing Protocols for Rural Areas that Communicates via Data Mules

In this paper the protocols that can bring connectivity to isolated village networks via multiple data mules is investigated and enhanced. The use of multiple mules communicating as a means to find shorter reliable routes and provide higher message delivery is researched. Using movement traces for the data mules for rural-like areas the existing protocols ad hoc on-demand distance vector protocol (AODV) and optimal relay path (ORP) were compared. This was the research question of if existing routing protocols perform in rural networks scenario using multiple data mules? The results exhibited that a rural route can provide telecommunication between the village networks, furthermore that AODV was more applicable to the network than ORP especially as the number of mules increase. Two enhancement algorithms (data mule inter-communicator (DMI) and ultimate data mule inter-communicator (UDMIC)) were developed using the existing protocols. The first enhancement was DMI; aided in answering the research question the usage of clustering of data improve the performance e.g. latency between rural networks? The second enhancement was UDMIC, which has the purpose of choosing the best algorithm based on the situation. This address the final research question of Can an adaptive algorithm be developed that makes use of existing protocols to improve performance rural networks? This enhancement not only managed to use the best of each protocol but in some cases improved network performance.