Routing in delay tolerant networks is a challenging issue due to the lack of proper end-to-end connectivity between the source and destination nodes. The controlled replication based routing approach include the basic Spray and Wait algorithm that tries to forward the messages by replicating them in a fixed number and then forwarding them to the relay nodes. In this paper, an empirical analysis was performed to compare and evaluate the basic Spray and Wait algorithms with some major improvements. The ONE simulator is used to provide a simulation environment to run these algorithms and generate the results. The simulation results show that in terms of delivery ratio and average delay `Composite Methods to improve Spray and Wait' outperforms all the other variants compared.