Performance Comparison of Two Interdomain Routing Schemes for Disruption Tolerant Networks

Abstract— Much work has been done on designing routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. However, existing solutions assume that an end-to-end path exists from a source to a destination. Some ad hoc network scenarios e.g. bus-based vehicular adhoc networks are characterized by frequent partitions and intermittent connectivity. Hence, new routing schemes designed for such networks have emerged in the past two years. These disruption tolerant network (DTN) routing schemes assume a flat architecture. However, in real life scenarios, nodes may be from different administrative domains and hence form different clusters. Thus, other means need to be provided to deliver interdomain traffic. In this paper, we first describe two interdomain routing protocols for disruption tolerant networks, namely the gateway-based and the ferry-based approaches. Then, we demonstrated via simulation studies that both interdomain routing schemes provide better delivery performance than the flat routing approach when different groups are segregated from one another. We also show that the ferrybased scheme achieves higher delivery ratio and lower average end-to-end delay for the interdomain traffic than GBIR when the ferry speed is higher than the average node speed. In addition, we demonstrated that the choice of intradomain routing scheme affects the delivery performance of intergroup messages. Using a multihop intradomain routing scheme is better than using a two-hop relay routing scheme. Subsequently, we evaluate how mobility models, number of groups affect the delivery performance of the ferry-based scheme.