A Study on the Performance of Delay-Tolerant Network Routing Protocols in the Campus Area of Rajshahi University, Bangladesh

Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) cannot possibly maintain continuous connections among source and destination nodes all the while and exploits mobility of nodes for message propagation. DTN uses store-carry-forward approach where message travels from source to destination node through intermediate nodes by opportunistic contacts due to node movement. These intermediate nodes keep the message in their buffer, carry it while on the move and forward it to the next intermediate node encountered untill the message gets to reach its destination. An important application of DTN is considered to provide for emergency message delivery to key personnel in a disaster-stricken area. The main challenge of DTN is to adopt an appropriate routing technique to deliver messages in the most efficient way. In this work, we look into the performance of DTN routing techniques such as Epidemic, MaxProp, Spray-and-Wait, and Spray-and-Focus by considering the campus area of Rajshahi University as it is one of the key points of importance for higher education and research in Bangladesh. Our goal is to evaluate the performance of DTN routing techniques for emergency message circulation in the campus area of Rajshahi University in case of disaster when regular communication networks are not available. We use the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator for the simulation of above situation. The performance of the DTN routing protocols is analyzed based on four criteria: delivery probability, transmission cost, average latency, and average hop count by varying the message size and the density of nodes. From the results obtained from simulation we see that Spray-and-Focus yields the best performance. On the other hand, Epidemic gives the worst performance in the campus area of Rajshahi University, Bangladesh with the given simulation settings