Evaluation of Routing Protocols for Opportunistic Networks in Scenarios with High Degree of People Renewal

Abstract

The performance of Opportunistic Networks relies mainly on users mobility. It is in fact mobility that creates the opportunities for contacts and therefore for data forwarding. The evaluation of these networks is usually based on either synthetic mobility models or real mobility traces generally characterized by a fixed number of users. In this paper, we focus on a mostly unexplored area characterized by crowded scenarios with people renewal, i.e., with users that can either enter or leave the evaluated scenario. By using a pedestrian mobility simulator we define realistic people mobility traces that allow the evaluation of different degrees of users densities and renewal rates. Using this methodology, we studied the performance of various existing routing protocols in scenarios with high degree of people renewal and by varying the messages sizes. The experiments confirm that the renewal rate has an important impact on the performance of the protocols, which becomes particularly evident when the message size is large. Overall, we observe that controlled flooding algorithm such as Spray & Wait can obtain good packet delivery results with lower overhead than with respect to probability based protocols, avoiding also the implementation complexity of the latters.