An enhanced MP-OLSR protocol for MANETs

Multipath Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (MP-OLSR) is a multipath extension of OLSR, a well knows proactive routing protocol developed especially for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). To find multiple paths, MP-OLSR uses the multipath Dijkstra´s algorithm. The algorithm obtains considerable flexibility and scalability by using the cost functions, route recovery and loop detection mechanisms in order to improve MANETs performances. However, MP-OLSR presents some drawbacks. First, data packets are distributed into different paths by using Round-Robin (RR) scheduling algorithm. RR is incapable to balance load among heterogeneous multiple paths. Second, the cost functions return fixed values without adaptability to network conditions. To overcome these drawbacks, we proposed, in this paper, to integrate Weighted Round-Robin (WRR) scheduling algorithm to MP-OLSR for supporting heterogeneous multiple paths with different hop count. And, we proposed also a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) to adapt the cost functions as function of hop count metric. Implementation and simulation experiments with Network Simulator NS2 are presented in order to validate our proposed goals. The results show that our enhanced MP-OLSR outperforms original MP-OLSR in terms of packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, jitter and routing cost.