Performance Analysis of Social-Aware Routing Protocols in Delay Tolerant Networks

In opportunistic environments data forwarding is challenging where connectivity is intermittent because of network partitioning, dynamic topologies and long delays. Traditional routing protocols of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) exploit "Store-Carry-and-Forward" strategy in these cases. But the pitfall of this approach is the selection of perfect relay node and the determination of best data transmission moment in dense and urban areas. To route data in such dynamic, heterogeneous networks social-based routing is an emerging technique that concerns social behaviors and interactions of nodes. Here, we look into the performances of customary routing protocols of DTN, such as Epidemic, Spray-and-Wait (SNW), PRoPHET with two social-aware routing protocols: SCORP and dLife by conducting simulations in Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator through three criteria, that are: delivery ratio, average latency and transmission cost with necessary simulation settings. The performances are evaluated by varying node density and message Time-To-Live (TTL). From the outcomes of this experiment, it can be said that dLife acts best for delivery ratio but worst for average latency. On the other hand, SNW has best performance for average latency, Epidemic shows lowest performance for both delivery ratio and transmission cost, where SCORP as well as SNW show best performances for transmission cost.