Fair Comparative Analysis of Opportunistic Routing Protocols: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Fair comparative analysis of opportunistic routing protocols plays a vital role in selecting a suitable routing protocol for various applications of opportunistic networks. In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of the routing protocols, namely, EPIDEMIC, Spray and Wait, PROPHET, First Contact, Direct Delivery, MaxProp, WaveRouter, and LifeRouter. The ONE simulator is used for this empirical study. This study measures the performance of protocols based on Delivery Probability, Overhead Ratio, and Average Latency with different mobility models as well as real-world mobility traces. The simulation results surprisingly show that Spray and Wait outperform all the other protocols in almost all scenarios. Further, CAHM mobility model is able to mimic real-world mobility closely resembling real-world mobility traces of different network densities.