Comparative Analysis of Delay-Tolerant Networking Protocol Implementations: Towards a Unified Performance Assessment Framework

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) are often characterized by sporadic network topologies and non-negligible delays. Common environments are sparse Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), underwater networks, or space networks. To compensate these tough network characteristics additional protocols, that are based on a Store-Carry-Forward approach, are currently developed. First implementations of these protocols are already available. While there is ongoing research comparing different protocols, there is little research on comparing actual implementations.

Goals of the thesis

The aim of this work is therefore to develop a generic test environment that makes it possible to compare different protocol implementations in terms of throughput and latency. Different protocol implementations need to be analyzed in order to identify commonalities and differences. Test scenarios need to be developed that allow a fair comparison between different implementations. The testbed is then used to compare two different DTN protocol implementations such that statements can be made on challenges and limitations of such a testbed as well as on the protocols' performance. A detailed written discussion of fundamentals, related work, testbed design, and obtained results concludes the thesis.

Keywords

Delay Tolerant Network, Testbed, Hardware, Satellite

Literature

[1] K. Fall, “A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets,” in Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications (SIGCOMM ’03), Karlsruhe, Germany: ACM, 2003. DOI: 10.1145/863955.863960.

[2] C. Caini, A. d’Amico, and M. Rodolfi, “DTNperf_3: A Further Enhanced Tool for Delay-/Disruption- Tolerant Networking Performance Evaluation,” in IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM ’13), Atlanta, GA, USA: IEEE, Dec. 2013. DOI: 10.1109/GLOCOM.2013.6831533.

Contact

• M. Franke
• C. Sommer