Investigating the impact of partial topology in proactive MANET routing protocols

We study the impact of using partial versus full topology in the OLSR (optimized link state routing) protocol for MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks). The core of OLSR is the notion of multi-point relays (MPRs), serving the purpose of reducing the amount of link-state information flooded to nodes in the network, as well as reducing the redundancy in the flooding process. The OLSR protocol specification contains a tunable parameter, MPR coverage, which adjusts the degree of redundancy in both the advertised link-state information, and the links over which the link-state information is advertised. We investigate the impact of assigning various values to this parameter. We further investigate two options for advertising additional link-state information: the "MPR full link-state" option implies that whenever a node is selected to declare any link-state information, it declares all its local link state information; the "full link-state" option states, that all nodes must declare all their local link-state information. Through simulations, we investigate the performance characteristics of OLSR with and without these options.