Evaluation of routing schemes in opportunistic networks considering energy consumption

Opportunistic networks are challenged wireless networks where most of the time contacts are intermittent and link performance is typically highly variable. In this kind of environment, an end-to-end path between the source and the destination may only exist for a brief period and may change quickly. Long propagation and variable queuing delays might be introduced and conventional routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks are inappropriate to deliver messages between nodes. Different routing protocols for opportunistic networks have been proposed in the literature. In most cases, authors evaluate the performance of their protocols considering metrics like delivery ratio and delivery latency, disregarding the importance of energy consumption constraint. In this work we compare the performance of the Epidemic, Spray and Wait, PROPHET, MaxProp and Bubble Rap routing protocols considering energy consumption. We evaluate how the energy consumption impacts the routing performance and how the different forwarding algorithms for opportunistic networks influence the energy usage in the mobile nodes.