Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols for Opportunistic Networks: An Energy Efficiency Perspective

Abstract

In most computer networks, a path between a sending node and the destination node is requiredto transfer data. There are instances where such a path for communication may not exist, suchas in space communications, and the standard message routing techniques will not work. OpportunisticNetworks were developed to solve this problem. Infrastructure-less Opportunistic Networks(OppNets) are a type of Delay Tolerant Networks where nodes in the network are responsible forforwarding messages to the destination nodes under the constraints of intermittent connectivity, dynamictopology changes, and non-guarantee of an end-to-end path. Various routing protocols weredeveloped for OppNets; however, these routing protocols are energy-inefficient, and this is a problembecause devices that are used in OppNets are usually battery-powered. In this project, newenergy-efficient routing protocols for OppNets, namely, E FirstContactRouter, E WaveRouter, EFloatingContentRouter and E LifeRouter were developed from their energy-inefficient base routingprotocols, namely FirstContactRouter, WaveRouter, FloatingContentRouter and LifeRouter. Theenergy-efficient routing protocols were compared against their energy-inefficient base protocols andother developed energy-efficient routing protocols, namely E-Prophet, E-Epidemic, E-MaxProp andE-Spray&Wait routing protocols. The energy metrics that we used to do the tests were the numberof dead nodes and the average remaining energy. Simulations were carried out using the OpportunisticNetwork Environment (ONE) simulator and it was discovered that the proposed energy-awarerouting protocols outperform their non-energy-aware counterparts in terms of the above-mentionedperformance metrics.