DTN-COMET: A Comprehensive Operational Metrics Evaluation Toolkit for DTN

Abstract: Delay- and Disruption-tolerant Networking (DTN) is essential for communication in challenging environments with intermittent connectivity, long delays, and disruptions. Ensuring high performance in these types of networks is crucial because windows for data transmission are sparse and often short. However, research on evaluating DTN implementations is limited. Moreover, existing research relies on manual testing methods that lack reproducibility and scalability. We propose a novel generic framework for reproducible performance evaluation of DTN implementations to address this issue. We validate the framework's accuracy using a physical testbed and compare the uD3TN and ION DTN implementations. This comparison reveals that uD3TN exhibits higher goodput and shorter bundle retention times. On the other hand, ION exhibited superior memory management and fault tolerance, albeit at the cost of sending and receiving performance. Through this comparison, our framework demonstrates the feasibility of developing a generic toolkit for evaluating DTN.