Author(s): Edmond Yeboah Gyampoh

The aim of the work in this study is to comprehensively discuss the key assumptions considered in the design and evaluation of DTN routing protocols.

• This study surveyed fifteen well known opportunistic DTN protocols and gives a comparison of them with respect to their design and evaluation practices.
• Key research trends in light of the comparison made are discussed and directions for future research proposed .

The key findings are;

• Existing protocols focus largely on the prioritization of packets as opposed to the selectivity of nodes /node priority.
• Packet priority metrics do not consider service priority.
• Protocols that consider node priority metrics large ignore the resource capacity of nodes.
• Storage/buffer space and node bandwidth not considered as direct metric inputs.
• Protocols that consider energy consumption as a direct performance metric report only communication energy and not mobility and computation energy.