Impact of vehicle movement models on VDTN routing strategies for rural connectivity

Vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs) appear as an alternative to provide low cost asynchronous internet access on developing countries or isolated regions, enabling non-real time services, such as e-mail, web access, telemedicine, environmental monitoring and other data collection applications. VDTNs are based on the delay-tolerant network (DTN) concept applied to vehicular networks, where vehicles mobility is used for connectivity. This paper considers a rural connectivity scenario and investigates how different mobility patterns and vehicle densities influence the performance of DTN routing protocols applied to VDTN networks. Moreover, routing protocols parameters are also changed in the present study. We analyse their effect on the performance of VDTNs through the bundle delivery ratio and the bundle average delay. We expect that this contribution will provide a deep understanding about implications of movement models on the performance of VDTNs applied to rural scenarios, leading to insights for future routing algorithm theoretic study 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 from the Seventh Framework Programme of EU