Evaluating the impact of storage capacity constraints on vehicular delay-tolerant networks

“Copyright © [2009] IEEE. Reprinted from Second International Conference on Communication Theory Reliability, and Quality of Service, 2009. CTRQ'09. ISBN:978-1-4244-4423-6. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.”Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Network (VDTN) was proposed as a particular application of a mobile Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN), where vehicles act as the communication infrastructure for the network, relaying messages between the network nodes. In this paper, we consider the use of a VDTN to provide low-cost asynchronous communication between sparse populations spread over a remote vast region. We analyze the influence of the VDTN network node’s storage capacity (buffer size), on the efficiency of four DTN routing protocols, in terms of message delivery probability. Our scenarios show that the routing protocols message replication strategies react differently to the increase of buffer size in specific network nodes. Epidemic and MaxProp protocols benefit from the increase of the storage capacity on all network nodes. Spray and Wait protocol only takes advantage on the increase of the vehicle’s buffer capacity. We expect that this paper will provide a deep understanding of the implications of storage constraints over the performance of a VDTN, leading to insights for future routing algorithm and buffer management theoretic studies and protocol design.Part of this work has been supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group, Portugal, in the framework of the Project VDTN@Lab, and by the Euro-NF Network of Excellence of Seven Framework Programme of EU