Performance evaluation on vehicular delay-tolerant networks

Delay-tolerant Network (DTN) is a computer network architecture that operates effectively over an extreme distance and communicates with heterogeneous networks that may affect the continuous network connectivity. DTN is particularly useful for the areas in which there are no direct connection (either physical or wireless) between source and destination over a long distance, as it can overcome the challenges of connectivity disruptions, delays, and disconnections situations. In this paper, a DTN using vehicles as the communication media will be evaluated in a simulated environment. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the vehicle DTN, two scenarios were simulated: 1) vehicles running along a predefined path and 2) vehicles running randomly along multiple paths. In the simulations, we evaluated the performance of DTN (e.g. latency, delivery probability, etc.) for different values of the system parameters. Based on the results, we made some suggestions on the choices of the parameters so as to improve the efficiency of DTN.