Performance evaluation of various routing protocols in Opportunistic Networks

In Opportunistic Networks (Oppnets), the end-to-end path between the source and the destination never exists or may exist only for a very short and unpredictable period of time. Therefore, routing in these type of networks is different from that in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) which first establish a source to destination path before the delivery of a message occurs. The nodes in Oppnets do not have or acquire the knowledge about the network topology which is necessary in case of MANETs. Here, the construction of routes is not static, but dynamic since the source can choose any node from a group of neighbors as a next hop assuming that it will deliver the message closer to the destination. In this paper, we have simulated, investigated and compared the performance of various routing protocols for Oppnets. Six existing routing protocols in Oppnets have been compared with each other by using various performance evaluating factors.