The effect of cooperation of nodes on VDTN routing protocols

Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks (VDTNs) are composed of mobile nodes (vehicles) that communicate with each other wirelessly and using store carry and forward paradigm to forward data despite intermittent connectivity. A serious threat against routing process in such context is the non-cooperation of nodes. Some of them misbehave because they are malicious, selfish or malfunctioning. Such routing misbehavior reduces the packet delivery ratio and wastes system resources. In this paper, we study the communication between ten sensors (stationary source nodes), arbitrary placed at the map and ten stationary destination nodes. The effects of node cooperation are explored for four well-known routing algorithms proposed for VDTNs. The results show that the sensitivity of the routings algorithms to the cooperation degree can be very high.