Congestion Aware Spray and Wait Protocol: A Congestion Control Mechanism for the Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network

In the last few years, the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has come to be an important area of research. Significant research has been conducted to improve the performance of VANETS. One output of further research conducted on VANET is the Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN). It is an application of the mobile DTN where nodes relay messages in the network using a store-carry-forward approach. Due to its high mobility, it suffers frequent disconnections and also congestions at nodes which leads to message drops. To minimize the rate of message drops and so optimize the probability of message delivery so that drivers are increasingly aware of the situation of the road, we propose a congestion control mechanism: Congestion Aware Spray and Wait (CASaW) protocol in this work so as to optimize the rate of message delivery to its destination and so increase the awareness of drivers in the vehicular environment thereby improve road safety. The results have shown that our proposition performed better than other classical VDTN protocols in terms of message delivery probability and rate of packet drops performance measures. We used the Opportunistic Networking Environment (ONE) simulator to implement the classical VDTN protocols: the PROPHET protocol, the Epidemic protocol, the MaxProp protocol and the Spray and Wait Protocol. The simulation scenarios shows a better performance for the congestion control mechanism we propose as it maintains a good message delivery rate as well as minimize the rate of packet losses thereby optimizing the chances of messages getting to their destinations and so improve road safety.