A Simulator for Analysis of Opportunistic Routing Algorithms

When mobile devices are unable to establish direct communication, or when communication should be offloaded to cope with large throughputs, mobile collaboration can be used to facilitate communication through opportunistic networks. These types of networks are formed when mobile devices communicate only using short-range transmission protocols, usually when users are close, can help applications exchange data. Routes are built dynamically, since each mobile device is acting according to the store-carry-and-forward paradigm. Thus, contacts are seen as opportunities to move data towards the destination. In such networks the routing protocol is of vital importance -- and today we witness quite a number of routing algorithms that have been proposed to maximize the success rate of message delivery whilst minimizing the communication cost. Such protocols take advantage of the devices´ history of contacts, or information about users carrying the mobile devices, to make their forwarding decision. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold: First, we present a new simplified, fast simulator, designed to minimize the work needed to conduct extensive tests for opportunistic routing algorithm on multiple traces, next we present an extensive analysis of several of the most popular routing algorithms through extensive simulations conducted using our simulation platform. We highlight their pros and cons in different scenarios, considering different real-world mobility data traces.