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 required
to transfer data. There are instances where such a path for communication may not exist, such
as in space communications, and the standard message routing techniques will not work. Opportunistic
Networks 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 for
forwarding messages to the destination nodes under the constraints of intermittent connectivity, dynamic
topology changes, and non-guarantee of an end-to-end path. Various routing protocols were
developed for OppNets; however, these routing protocols are energy-inefficient, and this is a problem
because devices that are used in OppNets are usually battery-powered. In this project, new
energy-efficient routing protocols for OppNets, namely, E FirstContactRouter, E WaveRouter, E
FloatingContentRouter and E LifeRouter were developed from their energy-inefficient base routing
protocols, namely FirstContactRouter, WaveRouter, FloatingContentRouter and LifeRouter. The
energy-efficient routing protocols were compared against their energy-inefficient base protocols and
other developed energy-efficient routing protocols, namely E-Prophet, E-Epidemic, E-MaxProp and
E-Spray&Wait routing protocols. The energy metrics that we used to do the tests were the number
of dead nodes and the average remaining energy. Simulations were carried out using the Opportunistic
Network Environment (ONE) simulator and it was discovered that the proposed energy-aware
routing protocols outperform their non-energy-aware counterparts in terms of the above-mentioned
performance metrics.