WWW@VDTN - A Web browsing application for Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks

Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks (VDTNs) use vehicles to carry data between network nodes, enabling network connectivity in sparse or partitioned opportunistic networks, where the node density is not high enough to establish end-to-end links. By implementing a store-carry-and-forward paradigm, VDTNs allow delay-tolerant data traffic from a variety of vehicular applications to be routed over time, such as, but not limited to, information queries (e.g. weather reports, web browsing, business services, road conditions, traffic volume) and context- specific broadcasts (e.g. advertising, entertainment feeds). This paper presents a Web browsing application for VDTNs, called WWW@VDTN, and analyzes its performance in a laboratory VDTN testbed. Epidemic and Spray and Wait routing schemes were combined with different scheduling and dropping policies in the performance evaluation process. It is shown that WWW@VDTN works properly in the VDTN testbed. Thus, it is envisioned that a real VDTN will be able to support Web access. Furthermore, the performance studies also reveal that a combination of scheduling and dropping policies that takes into account information about the remaining lifetime of data, improves the performance of the routing schemes in terms of delivery probability and delivery delay.