Development of Delay Tolerant Routing Protocols for Android based devices.

Abstract

A Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is mostly suitable where there is intermittent connection between communicating nodes such as wireless mobile ad hoc network nodes. In general, a message sending node in a DTN copies the message and transmits it to nodes which it encounters. A receiving node, if it is not the destination of the message, stores the message and transmits a copy of the message to nodes it encounters. The process continues until the message reaches its destination or its life time expires. For nodes to communicate, two broad classes of routing protocols were developed, that is flooding-based and forwarding-based protocols. 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, AL-DTN, was created to use these protocols for testing in a live situation on Makerere University students’ Android smartphones. The results showed that an implementation of an energy efficient algorithm to epidemic gives better performance on the Android devices. Specifically, our new routing protocol implementation, AL-DTN, showed lower battery and memory than original epidemic protocol.