Due to the increased capabilities of mobile devices and through wireless opportunistic contacts, users can experience new ways to share and retrieve content anywhere and anytime, even in the presence of link intermittency. Due to the significant number of available routing solutions, it is difficult to understand which one has the best performance, since all of them follow a different evaluation method. This paper proposes an assessment model, based on a new taxonomy, which comprises an evaluation guideline with performance metrics and experimental setup to aid designers in evaluating solutions through fair comparisons. Simulation results based on the proposed model revisit the performance results published by Epidemic, PROPHET, and BubbleRap, showing how they perform under the same set of metrics and scenario.
@cite_11: Communication networks, whether they are wired or wireless, have traditionally been assumed to be connected at least most of the time. However, emerging applications such as emergency response, special operations, smart environments, VANETs, etc. coupled with node heterogeneity and volatile links (e.g. due to wireless propagation phenomena and node mobility) will likely change the typical conditions under which networks operate. In fact, in such scenarios, networks may be mostly disconnected, i.e., most of the time, end-to-end paths connecting every node pair do not exist. To cope with frequent, long-lived disconnections, opportunistic routing techniques have been proposed in which, at every hop, a node decides whether it should forward or store-and-carry a message. Despite a growing number of such proposals, there still exists little consensus on the most suitable routing algorithm(s) in this context. One of the reasons is the large diversity of emerging wireless applications and networks exhibiting such "episodic" connectivity. These networks often have very different characteristics and requirements, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to design a routing solution that fits all. In this paper, we first break up existing routing strategies into a small number of common and tunable routing modules (e.g. message replication, coding, etc.), and then show how and when a given routing module should be used, depending on the set of network characteristics exhibited by the wireless application. We further attempt to create a taxonomy for intermittently connected networks. We try to identify generic network characteristics that are relevant to the routing process (e.g., network density, node heterogeneity, mobility patterns) and dissect different "challenged" wireless networks or applications based on these characteristics. Our goal is to identify a set of useful design guidelines that will enable one to choose an appropriate routing protocol for the application or network in hand. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of our approach, we take up some case studies of challenged wireless networks, and validate some of our routing design principles using simulations.
The most recent classification proposed by (2010) @cite_11 groups opportunistic routing proposals according to the message exchange scheme they employ: forwarding, replication, and coding. Authors also identify different types of utility functions that can be applied to such schemes. Additionally, Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) are classified based on characteristics that have major impact on routing such as connectivity and mobility. Authors succeed in mapping routing solutions to the different DTN types, which allows them to evaluate proposals accordingly.