SubwayMeshDTN: Exploring Opportunistic Delay Tolerant Routing Protocols when Disseminating Emergency Alerts on a Smart City Subway Network

TL;DR

This study evaluates the performance of opportunistic delay-tolerant routing protocols, Epidemic and MaxProp, in NYC subway networks for disseminating emergency alerts, comparing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth topologies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive benchmark of DTN routing protocols in subterranean environments, analyzing movement patterns, latency, and delivery rates with real-world underground traces.

Findings

Epidemic and MaxProp protocols vary in effectiveness depending on network conditions.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi topologies exhibit different performance metrics in underground DTNs.

The accordion effect significantly influences message dissemination efficiency.

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the effectiveness of using multi-dimensional opportunistic delay-tolerant network (DTN) routing protocols, specifically Epidemic and MaxProp, in the context of New York City (NYC) metropolitan subway network. We examine how efficiently emergency messages spread through mobile, self-configuring, edge-based movement patterns on the train network to understand and propose solutions for improving communication in subterranean environments. Since DTNs are able to store, carry and forward messages through intermediate edges, this paper benchmarks both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth topologies to compare and critically evaluate movement patterns, latency, overheads and delivery rates on pseudo-realistic underground traces. We also show that the accordion effect is predominant in these networks, and therefore, the most effective protocol configurations vary.