Performance Analysis of Delay Tolerant Network Routing Protocols in a Heterogeneous Vehicular Network

Usage of wireless gadgets is increasing day by day in both metropolitan and countryside localities. The network infrastructure does not reach all the localities; especially in rural areas, where the internet availability is inadequate to meet the network requirements. Devices in such rural locations will be out of the network for some period. This non-persistent connectivity problem can be solved by using the moving nodes as a carrier for data transmission. In this work, we classify the vehicular network into sparse, semi-sparse and dense network based on the number of static and moving nodes present in a location. In sparse and semi-sparse network, there won't be any continuous path between the source and destination nodes. In such networks, we can use Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) protocols for data transmission. In our work, we try to find the suitable DTN protocol for the sparse and semi-sparse network topology. The protocols considered in this work are Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and Maxprop and the parameters we analyzed are delivery ratio, average latency and overhead ratio. We simulated these protocols in a vehicular network with heterogeneous characteristics, for the dense, semi-sparse and sparse network topology. The routing protocols performance is analyzed by delivery ratio, average latency and overhead ratio using Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator for varying the message lifetime and node density.