Redundant TC message senders in OLSR

Abstract

In this letter, we reveal redundant control traffic in the optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) for MANET. Topology control (TC) messages, which occupy a part of control traffic in OLSR, are used to exchange topology information with other nodes. TC messages are generated and forwarded by only nodes that have been selected as multipoint relays (MPRs) by at least one neighbor node. These nodes selected as MPRs are called TC message senders in this letter. One of solutions to reduce the number of TC messages is to reduce the number of TC message senders. We describe a non-distributed algorithm to minimize the number of TC message senders. Through simulation of static-node scenarios, we show 18% to 37% of TC message senders in RFC-based OLSR are redundant. By eliminating redundant TC message senders, the number of TC packets, each of which contains one or more TC messages, is also reduced from 19% to 46%. We also show that high density scenarios have more redundancy than low density scenarios. This observation can help to consider a cooperative MPR selection in OLSR. Copyright© 2010.