Adaptive: An Adaptive Routing Protocol for Vehicle Delay-Tolerant Networks

The aim of this work is to propose a new routing protocol for a Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN) called Adaptive. This protocol is based in predictable contacts concept and uses the history of meeting nodes to determine the best way to route and drop packets on network. The following performance metrics were used to evaluate the Adaptive: delivery rate, average delay and average number of hops. The Adaptive performance was then compared to the following routing protocols commonly used in the literature: First Contact, Direct Transmission, Prophet, Epidemic and Spray and Wait. The simulations were based on a vehicle DTN build from real traces collected from city buses. Two scenarios were simulated: 1) alternating transmission range of all the nodes and 2) alternating the amount of data generated on the network per user. The simulations showed that the Adaptive presented satisfactory results in both scenarios. It was able to achieve the best delivery rates when nodes had a transmission range of 300 meters or more. In addition, the Adaptive has shown that it is able to adapt well to the various data traffic intensities imposed on the network.