Are VDTN routing protocols suitable for data collection in smart cities: a performance assessment

Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks (VDTNs) are composed of mobile nodes (vehicles) that communicate wirelessly to transfer data between nodes despite connectivity issues. It enables network connectivity in sparse or partitioned opportunistic networks, characterized by the low node density where the vehicular traffic is sparse and direct end-to-end paths between communicating parties do not always exist. Routing in such environments is challenging due to the absence, for nodes, of information about the state of the partitioned network, and because transfer opportunities between nodes are of limited duration. This paper focuses on the study of the performance of some well-known VDTN routing protocols in different scenarios to assess their suitability of use in the case of collecting sensor data in cities. In this paper we study the case of stationary nodes that represent urban sensor measuring different types of data, and transmitting collected information to stationary destination nodes, which are connected to the Internet. The transmission mechanism is performed through a set of mobile nodes in a VDTN context. We study the impact of different parameters on the routing protocols performances, using a large set of simulations and two scenarios. The results show that there is no perfect routing protocolthat is the best for all scenarios.