A Framework for Simulation Analysis of Delay Tolerant Routing Protocols

A variety of network deployments in disaster recovery, fire fighting and military scenarios create networks that do not form a connected network all the time. In such scenarios, paths between a source and destination may be created over time when nodes encounter each other due to node mobility. Many routing algorithms that can route messages in such delay-tolerant networking (DTN) settings have been proposed. Each of these proposals presents simulation and/or analytical results to demonstrate improved performance in comparison with other known protocols. This paper proposes a common framework that defines multiple important components through which performance of these protocols can be compared using simulation experiments. This framework includes performance metrics that can be used for comparison, simulation environment, new mobility models and results in organizing the various known protocols based on their ability to predict a path. In a case study using the framework, we demonstrate how the predictive ability of PROPHET may or may not result in significant performance gains, depending on the mobility model.