OLSR control overhead reduction by using game theory

Recently, MANET has been gaining the popularity since it can be deployed easily anywhere anytime. There are two main routing protocols in MANET: proactive and reactive routing protocols. In this work, we focus on proactive protocol called OLSR (Optimize Link State Routing Protocol), where the routes are always maintained by interchanging control overhead namely HELLO and TC (Topology Control) messages. However, this causes the waste of resource and performance degradation. We propose the method to reduce the overhead while maintain the throughput of OLSR by using the well-known mathematic tool, widely used in interactive decision systems, called game theory. OLSR is modified in such a way that every node in the system has to play the game when HELLO and TC interval are expired. Each node will choose its strategy to "Update" or "Not Update" the HELLO and TC messages in each round of game. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by using parameters namely Normalized Routing Overhead (NRO), Average Throughput and Normalized Overhead Reduction Index (NORI). According to the simulation results, it is apparent that the proposed algorithm provides large NRO reduction while the Average Throughput is maintained. That is, the proposed algorithm can reduce the control overhead while the performance (average throughput) is kept mostly unchanged.