Towards A Simple and Efficient VDTN Routing Protocol for Data Collection in Smart Cities

Smart cities today can utilize Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTN) to collect data from connected-objects in the environment for various delay-tolerant applications. They can take advantage of the available Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) infrastructures to deliver data to the central server. The system can also exploit multiple and diverse mobility patterns found in cities, such as privately owned cars, taxis, public buses, and trams, along with their Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications capabilities. In the envisioned convergence between the ITS and V2X, we believe that a simple and efficient routing protocol can be deployed for the delay-tolerant data delivery, contrary to the implementation of optimized solutions that might be resource-demanding and difficult to standardize. In this paper, we analyzed the performances of four baseline VDTN routing protocols, namely: Direct Delivery, First Contact, Epidemic, and Spray & Wait, to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Our simulation results highlighted the trade-off between distinct approaches used by those protocols and pointed out some gaps that can be refined. This study provides new interesting ideas and arguments towards developing a simple, efficient, and high-performing routing protocol for data collection in smart cities.