The Effect of Bundle Aggregation on the Performance of Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks

Recently, vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs) were proposed as a new network architecture for sparse vehicular networks. VDTN architecture adopts the DTN store-carry-and-forward paradigm. At the edge of the network, terminal nodes provide internetworking on heterogeneous networks. In VDTNs, datagrams are assembled in large data packets, called bundles. At the ingress edge node of VDTNs, bundle aggregation process assemblies incoming IP Packets (datagrams) from the higher layer into bundles. When bundles reach the destination edge node, they are de-aggregated in order to retrieve the original IP packets, forwarding them to the upper layers. This paper proposes several aggregation algorithms based on time or threshold values, and studies their performance evaluation through a laboratory testbed, called VDTN@Lab. The hybrid approach presents the best performance for different types of traffic load.