Design and Assessment of Routing Protocols For Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks.

Abstract

Through this thesis, we aimed to contribute to the research field of Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs), and more importantly to the subfield of VDTN routing protocols. Indeed, our research works brought to light multiples findings related to this hot research topic; at first we gave a reminder about the minimal requirements needed to correctly assess the performances of VDTN routing protocols, especially regarding the considered network simulator & vehicle mobility, additionally to the realism of the scenario. Subsequently, our comparative study of main protocols demonstrated the suitability of geographic-based routing protocols compared to predictive ones. Consequently, we proposed the new geographic-based protocol GeoDTC based on Distance, Time and Custody transfer, which demonstrated its ability to outperform well-known geographic-based protocols, while achieving an ideal trade-off between a high delivery ratio and an acceptable overhead. Last but not least, we developed through this thesis a common architecture for the implementation of such routing protocols, which was largely used to achieve our works and was made publicly available online, in the hope that this will reduce the development gap and enrich the research community.