Delay tolerant routing protocol for heterogeneous marine vehicular mobile ad-hoc network

Delay tolerant networks (DTN) are characterized by lack of end-to-end communications and stable infrastructures. This paper deals with DTN networks consisting of a number of heterogeneous mobile fishing vessels where some nodes, referred to as adaptive nodes, are capable of communicating through long-range Wi-Fi whereas other nodes are having simple Wi-Fi access network. The nodes form different clusters consisting of adaptive nodes and access nodes. Message routing in this heterogeneous network happens through adaptive nodes if the source and destination nodes belong to different clusters. Real data from field study reflects that mobile nodes in this network follow Gaussian-Markov mobility model and may have high inter-meeting arrival time based on deployment and node density. Our proposed DTN routing protocol incorporates simple encounter-based message forwarding and achieves lower latency and high delivery probability in the range of 90-98% for most of the scenarios. The proposed protocol is verified through a realistic mobile ad-hoc wireless simulator.