The Development of Delay-Tolerant Routing Protocols for Android-based Devices.

Abstract

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) are those which allow communication in highly stressed environments characterised by frequent intermittent connections, limited node resources and dynamic topologies. For nodes to communicate, two broad classes of routing protocols were developed, that is flooding-based and forwarding-based protocols. Previous DTN deployments on Android used one protocol, PRoPHET, without comparing its performance with others on the platform. This report documents the research carried out for the development of delay-tolerant routing protocols for use on Android-based devices and the comparison of their performance under various scenarios. A demo text-messaging Android application, MK-DTN, was created to use these protocols for testing in a live situation on Makerere University students’ Android smartphones. The results showed that a combination of forwarding- and flooding-based protocols were better performers on the Android devices. Specifically, our new routing protocol implementation, MKP, showed lower CPU, memory and battery utilisation than other flooding-based techniques. As future work, the research proposes implementing wide-area DTNs for Android devices, focusing on security and improved node synchronization.