Assessing the effectiveness of DTN techniques under realistic urban environments

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) require collecting and distributing as much relevant information as possible to provide their services. Such information could also offer new possibilities to various service providers in the wider Smart City context. The distribution of this intelligence is carried out through various vehicular networking strategies, the most flexible of all being Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). DTN protocols can cope with the problems derived from high mobility and the possibility of high node sparsity. Nevertheless, achieving a fair comparison of DTN solutions in an urban environment is a hard task. In this paper we present a generic DTN model that we use to compare various representative DTN solutions in a metropolitan scenario. We highlight the weak and strong points of each evaluated proposal by also taking into consideration different sending strategies adopted to improve the performance of DTN protocols.