Investigation of delay tolerant network routing protocols with energy consumption analysis

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are the results of the evolutions in mobile networks in which an end-to-end path may not exist. The main principle of DTN to route messages is store, carry and forward technique, where intermediate hosts store data to be transmitted until it finds an appropriate relay host to forward the message in the route towards its target. DTNs have numerous applications in ad-hoc networking such as life monitoring and crisis management. Several routing and forwarding protocols have been proposed among the past few years. Majority of them uses asynchronous message passing scheme. The primary difference between various DTN routing protocols is the amount of knowledge that they have available to route the message. Flooding protocols such as Epidemic and Spray and Wait (SaW) routing protocols do not use any information. Predictive protocols such as PRoPHET and MaxProp uses past encounters of hosts to expect their future suitability to transmit messages to its destination. Store, carry and forward technique of DTN routing protocols causes a lot of copies of a message in the networks which consuming hosts’ resources like energy and buffer. The main challenge in DTN routing is how to increase delivery ratio of messages and consume less resources. This thesis focuses on the routing issue in DTNs using limited resources and investigate the performance of four well-known DTN protocols which is Epidemic, PRoPHET, MaxProp and SaW with the metrics node’s average remaining energy, number of dead nodes, delivery ratio, average latency and overhead ratio using the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator. It has been observed that the performance of routing protocols has been affected by the changing of message generation interval, number of nodes, node’s speed, buffer size, time to live and the message size. The simulation investigation results that the SaW protocol outperforms other protocols in terms of energy consumption whereas MaxProp protocol has the highest delivery ratio. In contrast, Epidemic results the worst performance.