Analysis of Delay-Tolerant Routing Protocols using the Impact of Mobility Models

Abstract

Intermittently connected mobile networks are sparsely connected wireless ad-hoc networks where there is no end-to-end path from a source device to a destination. Generally, these paths do not exist. Hence, these devices use intermittent path using the concept of the store-and-forward mechanism to successfully do the communication. These networks are featured by long delay, dissimilar data rates, and larger error rates. Hence, we see the analysis of several delay-tolerant routing protocols, e.g., epidemic, spray-and-wait, prophet, maxprop, rapid, and spray-and-focus using opportunistic network environment simulator. At first, the investigations of the above considered routing protocols are done across three mobility models namely random direction, random walk, and shortest path map based movement mobility model for node impact only. Then, we evaluate these routing protocols against the impact of message copy, buffer, and time-to-live using shortest path map considering the result of node impact. We use three metrics and the result shows that spray-and-focus deserves good performance for showing higher delivery, lower latency, and lower overhead among all routing techniques while epidemic the poor.