# On the Potential of Enhancing Delay-Tolerant Routing Protocols via Age of Information
## 4 Protocol Evaluation
### Cumulative Comparison  
In this section, the main results of the above simulations are presented for the three versions of the modified protocol proposed in the work and the three versions of the original FRESH protocol that were studied. The two metrics that are examined are the throughput and the average age of the network packets. The execution time of the simulations is also studied. Initially, in order to analyze the effect of the number of time slots on the simulations, Figure 5 is constructed, capturing the dependence of the throughput on the change in the number of time slots for the four versions of FRESH (where each node delivers its packet to some \"near anchor\"). It is noted that the ratio of the Bound value for the AoI for the two modified versions of the FRESH protocol to the number of time slots selected in each case equals 7% for the first two time slots values, 4% for the price of 5000 time slots, 2% for the price of 10,000 time slots and 1.33% for the price of 15,000 time slots. From the above graph, it is possible to extract the number of time slots above which the so-called \"transient effect\" has completely disappeared, resulting in the throughput tending asymptotically to a constant value. For all four protocols, it seems that for a number of time slots greater than 5000, the throughput does not change significantly, so it is safe to conclude that the value of 5000 time slots is sufficient to eliminate the transient phenomena. Furthermore, for all time slots values, the Modified-near-v1 and FRESH-near-v1 protocols demonstrate the best performance, since in them, by definition, nodes search for their optimal \"nearest anchor  
Figure 5: Dependence of throughput versus number of time slots for Modified-near-v1, Modified-near-v2, FRESH-near-v1 and FRESH-near-v2 protocols. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \begin{tabular}{c} **Number of** \\ **Nodes** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Time Slots** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Radius of** \\ **Proximity** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Produced** \\ **Packets** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Successful** \\ **Packets** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Remaining** \\ **Packets** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Execution** \\ **Time (s)** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Throughput** \\ \end{tabular} & \
\begin{tabular}{c} **Mean AoI** \\ **(Time** \\ \end{tabular} &
\begin{tabular}{c} **Max AoI** \\ **(Time** \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline
100 & 5000 & 149 & 10,080 & 3706 & 6374 & 426.18 & 0.367 & 1571.19 & 5000 \\ \hline
250 & 5000 & 149 & 10,078 & 1247 & 8831 & 1074.49 & 0.123 & 1294.85 & 5000 \\ \hline
500 & 5000 & 149 & 9970 & 600 & 9370 & 3415.69 & 0.06 & 2360.14 & 5000 \\ \hline
100 & 10,000 & 149 & 20,001 & 7296 & 12,705 & 1538.44 & 0.364 & 3111.45 & 9998 \\ \hline
100 & 15,000 & 149 & 29,949 & 10,645 & 19,304 & 3275.26 & 0.355 & 4807.08 & 15,000 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 13: Larger scale simulation for FRESH-near-v2. node\" and not just the first better that they encounter, therefore the chances of successful transmission of the packets are increased in these two protocols. In fact, it is observed that in 4/5 cases, the Modified-near-v1 protocol outperforms the FRESH-near-v1 even for a while, a result which certainly needs justification, as the modified versions of the FRESH protocol were proposed in this paper in order to improve the packet age domain and not (necessarily) the throughput, a result which is confirmed by conducting many of the same simulations and averaging the results. Furthermore, we should not forget the dependence of the throughput on the AoI Bound in the two versions of the modified protocol proposed in the work. A clearer conclusion about this dependence is drawn below by citing a related graph. However, a similar superiority is observed in the Modified-near-v2 protocol over FRESH-near-v2 in the field of performance.