Evaluation of DTN Routing Protocols

In Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) data can transfer in challenging environments where a fully connected end to end path may never exist between a source and destination. These networks deal with large transmission delays, frequently disconnected paths, high link & path error and limited resources. Modern Internet protocols exhibits inefficient performance in those networks where the connectivity between end nodes has intermittent property due to dynamic topology such as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) or Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET). Network environment where the nodes are characterized by opportunistic connectivity are referred to as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). In this paper we compare some of the well-known routing protocols namely First Contact, Direct Delivery, Epidemic, Spray and Wait, Probabilistic Routing Protocol using History of Encounters and Transitivity (PROPHET) and MaxProp. We evaluated the DTN routing protocols performance in terms of three metrics: Delivery Probability, Average latency and Buffer Time over simulation Time To better judge the performance of these routing protocols, the series of simulations are carried out in The ONE (Opportunistic Network Environment) simulator with program version of 1.4.1.