Performance Comparison of Routing Protocols in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

In today's world doing data transfer in delay tolerant networks (DTN) environment is a challenging task.In DTN nodes are characterized to meet opportunistically to do routing and data transfer.In opportunistic environment no end-to-end path exists between destination and source.The contacts are made opportunistic while coming in contact for a short span of time.All communication is within this span only.Due to this feature the DTN's are sometimes recognized as Opportunistic Networks (ON's).The rules are not predefined here for choosing the next node as applicable in conventional schemes of routing.In this paper the performance of opportunistic routing protocols have been investigated namely PRoPHET, Spray and Wait, SimBet, Bubble Rap in terms of robustness and scalability.The concept of Ant Colony Optimization is used to find optimal routes while doing routing decision.The performance of SimBet and Bubble Rap is better with respect to throughput as they belong to social context aware category of protocols.Performance is evaluated in terms of packet dropped and overhead ratio also.The overhead ratio is better in SimBet and Bubble Rap as compared to Spray and Wait and PRoPHET.Depending on buffer size, speed, contact times these routing strategies shows variable performance.The result indicates that the social aware algorithms have the ability and capacity to exchange/carry information faster and improve the connectivity in ON's.