Analysis of Epidemic, PROPHET and Spray and Wait Routing Protocols in the Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Background: The Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs) are a type of Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs) with Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) features, where the sender to receiver connectivity never exists most of the time, due to dynamic nature of the nodes and the network partition. The real use of OMNs is to provide connectivity in challenged environments. Methods: The paper presents the detailed analysis of three routing protocols, namely Epidemic, PROPHET and Spray and Wait, against variable size of the messages and the Time To Live (TTL) in the networks. The key contribution of the paper is to explore routing protocols with mobility models for the dissemination of data to the destination. Routing uses the store-carry-forward mechanism for message transfer and network has to keep compromise between message delivery ratio and delivery delay. Results: The results are generated from the experiments with Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator. The performance is evaluated based on three metrics, the delivery ratio, overhead ratio and the average latency. The results show that the minimum message size (256 KB) offers better performance in the delivery than the larger message size (1 MB). It has also been observed that with the epidemic routing, since there are more message replicas, which in turn increase the cost of delivery, so with a smaller message, the protocol can reduce the overhead ratio with a high proportion. Conclusion: The average latency observed increases with the increase of the TTL of the message in three protocols with variation of the message size from 256KB to 1 MB.