Impact of Network Density on the Performance of Delay Tolerant Protocols in Heterogeneous Vehicular Network

Vehicular networks is an evolving area, which uses the moving vehicles to create mobile network. Vehicles equipped with wireless technologies will act as a temporary communication infrastructure. In this work we studied various challenges in a vehicular network and determined the most suitable existing architecture for a vehicular network to overcome the challenges. The vehicular networks differ from conventional ad-hoc networks due to the high mobility, dynamic network topology and node density, network partitioning, non-persistent connectivity, etc. Therefore, routing becomes more challenging and conventional routing protocols are not suitable for vehicular networks. The mobile nodes can exchange data between each other if the routing protocols support Store-Carry-Forward (SCF) mechanism. Hence, a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) protocol is required for efficient forwarding of data packets in such dynamic network. Due to this we analyzed the performance of existing DTN routing protocols such as Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and Maxprop. The impact of varying node density was analyzed for the parameters overhead ratio, delivery ratio and average latency using the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator.