Investigation of Delay Tolerant Network Routing Protocols with Energy Consumption Analysis

Abstract

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 challenge in DTN routing is how to increase delivery ratio of messages and consume less resources. This paper focuses on the routing and energy consumption issues in DTNs using limited resources and investigate the performance of four DTN routing protocols which are Epidemic, PRoPHET, MaxProp and Spray andWait (SaW) with the metrics such as node's average remaining energy, number of dead nodes, delivery ratio, average latency and overhead ratio. All of these investigations are performed in detail by changing number of nodes, message size, message generation interval, node's speed, time to live and buffer size. The simulation results show 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.