Luming Wan¹, Feiyang Liu¹, Juan Zhang², and Haibo Zhang¹, ¹University of Otago, New Zealand and ²Beihang University, China

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a promising technology which aims to provide efficient communication between devices in a network with no guaranteed continuous connectivity. Most of the existing routing schemes for DTNs achieve message delivery through message replication and forwarding. However, due to the lack of contemporaneous end-to-end communication path, designing routing protocols that can achieve high delivery rate with low communication overhead is a challenging problem. Some routing protocols appear with high similarity, but their performance are significantly different. In this paper, we evaluate several popular routing protocols in DTNs, including Epidemic, Spray and Wait, PRoPHET, and 3R through extensive trace-driven simulations. The objective is to evaluate the performance of different routing schemes using different data traces and investigate the optimal configuration setting for each routing scheme. This paper provides important guidances on the design and selection of routing protocols for given delay tolerant networks.

Delay Tolerant Network, Performance Evaluation, Routing