Energy Consumption and Performance of Delay Tolerant Network Routing Protocols under Different Mobility Models

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a mobile ad hoc network in which every node does not have wireless connection with other nodes all the time i.e. there is no path from one node to other nodes and data delivery path cannot be calculated before sending data. Traditional ad hoc routing protocols cannot be used in DTN. Basically in DTN routing, a node stores the message and when it encounters another node it forwards a copy of the message to the node which repeats the same process until the destination node is encountered and the message is delivered or the message life is expired. Nodes in DTN are resource constrained, i.e. they have less energy (battery operated) and have less memory to buffer messages. It is important to utilize the resources efficiently in DTN. There are various routing protocols designed to use resources efficiently. In this paper, we perform analysis of three important DTN routing protocols to see their resource utilization specially energy consumption under three different mobility models. Furthermore, we also compare their message delivery probability and message overhead ratio.