OLSRp: Predicting Control Information to Achieve Scalability in OLSR Ad Hoc Networks

• Published in: Mobile Networks and Management pp. 225 - 236
• Main Authors: Medina, Esunly, Meseguer, Roc, Molina, Carlos, Royo, Dolors
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2011
• Series: Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
• Subjects: energy-aware; mobile ad hoc networks; prediction
• ISBN: 9783642214431; 3642214436
• ISSN: 1867-8211; 1867-822X
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-21444-8_20

Scalability is a key design challenge that routing protocols for ad hoc networks must properly address to maintain the network performance when the number of nodes increases. We focus on this issue by reducing the amount of control information messages that a link state proactive routing algorithm introduces to the network. Our proposal is based on the observation that a high percentage of those messages is always the same. Therefore, we introduce a new mechanism that can predict the control messages that nodes need for building an accurate map of the network topology so they can avoid resending the same messages. This prediction mechanism, applied to OLSR protocol, could be used to reduce the number of messages transmitted through the network and to save computational processing and energy consumption. Our proposal is independent of the OLSR configuration parameters and it can dynamically self-adapt to network changes.