Enhancing OLSR protocol performance through improved detection of Spatial Dependence

One of the key factors of the OLSR routing protocol is the MPR selection algorithm, which is based only on the reachability of each neighbor, not taking into consideration how they are moving. As a result, the selected MPR set may be unstable. One way to improve the stability of the MPR set is through spatial mobility metrics that are able to promptly monitor the degree of movement correlation between a node and its neighbors. However, we show that current metrics have limitations on capturing the spatial correlation in the various states of collective motion. Through an enhanced spatial mobility metric, we propose a MPR selection algorithm, which was integrated into a new mobility-aware OLSR protocol. The new technique provided an performance gain in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay, besides presenting fewer out of order packets.