Performance Evaluation of Social Routing Protocols Based on the Effect of Delivery Ratio and Average Hop Count in Delay-tolerant Networks (DTN)

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are part of Opportunistic networks. In the case of opportunistic networks, the joined node of a network can have zero or partial knowledge about other nodes in a network. For this reason, the evident information towards the nodes in the existing network is most difficult to collect for forwarding the message. The application of Opportunistic networks is where have a high tolerance for long delays, high error rate, etc. DTNs are also sparse dynamic Ad-hoc networks were source to destination path does not present all-time for successfully message transmission. As DTN has no end-to-end path for message transmission source to destination node so, the routing design is so sophisticated. The social-based routing protocol is developed to improve the routing mechanism by focusing on social behavior and the interaction with the nodes of a network. Consequently, the performance analysis of existing several DTN routing protocols represents a significant role in designing or developing a new routing protocol for a specific scenario. This article investigates the execution of ordinary routing protocols of DTNs such as Epidemic, Binary Spray and Wait (BSNW), including two social-based routing protocols such as Scorp and dLife using Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator. The performance of these routing protocols is measured based on delivery ratio and average hop count with inevitable simulation settings. From the simulation result, it is condensed that for higher delivery ratio, BSNW is best, and for average hop count, dLife is the best routing protocol.