Increasing Reality for DTN Protocol Simulations

Powerful personal devices provide the basis for ad-hoc networking among mobile users. Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) enables such communication in spite of low node density - to reach an infrastructure network as well as for direct information exchange between peers. Numerous DTN routing protocols have been developed, and their analysis has shown different performance depending on the (human) mobility assumed - ranging from simple to complex mobility models to a variety of real-world traces. The authors have designed a simulation environment that allows incrementally adding bits of reality to mobile (DTN) simulations, running different DTN routing protocols, and interactively visualizing the results.