Man4VDTN – A network management solution for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

Vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs) follow the delay-tolerant networking (DTN) paradigm for vehicular communications in order to offer a network solution handling several issues, such as short contact durations, network disruption, variable node density, and packets fragmentation. All these issues represent a huge challenge for vehicular communications. The design and construction of a network management solution is also conditioned by these particular characteristics. The standard Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is widely used on conventional networks but it is not directly deployable on VDTNs. Then, this paper proposes an SNMP-based solution for VDTNs supporting load-related information collection from VDTN nodes using SNMP. The design, demonstration, performance evaluation and validation of this network management approach through a laboratory-based VDTN testbed are presented. It was shown that SNMP is suitable for being used in challenging environments such as VDTNs.