Abstract

Opportunistic Networks (Oppnets) provide the communication facilities in the network scenarios where the end-to-end path between the source and the destination never exists or may last only for an unpredictable and very short period of time. The disconnections and re-connections between the nodes are very common in Oppnets. Therefore, routing in these types of networks is a very challenging task and it is different from that in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), which assumes a complete path from the source to the destination before the delivery of a message. As the nodes does all the computations for next hop selection in infrastructure-less Oppnets, a lot of battery power gets consumed which reduces the network lifetime. Thus a proper energy efficient routing protocol should be selected for message passing in these types of networks. In this paper, we have simulated, investigated and compared the performance of various already existing routing protocols for infrastructure-less Oppnets in terms of energy consumption. These protocols have been compared with each other by using various performance evaluating factors like average residual energy, number of nodes that become dead after the simulation run of the protocol.