Performance assessment of IP over vehicular delay-tolerant networks through the VDTN@Lab testbed

Abstract

Abstract Vehicular delay-tolerant network (VDTN) is a network architecture based on the delay-tolerant network paradigm, which was designed to provide low-cost asynchronous vehicular communications in environments with disruptions, intermittency, variable delays, and network partition. This article proposes a laboratory testbed for VDTNs, called VDTN@Lab. It aims to support research studies related with the design, emulation, performance evaluation, and diagnose of new VDTN protocols, services, and applications. It intends to demonstrate the applicability of VDTNs over multiple application environments. VDTN@Lab features an emulation capability, allowing live experiments with prototyped hardware and software embedded into robotic cards, desktop, and netbooks computers. The proposed prototype is demonstrated and evaluated with Epidemic, and Spray, and Wait routing protocols, using different combinations of scheduling and dropping policies, in scenarios with different vehicular mobility models (bus movement and random movement across roads).