Energy-Efficient Variations of OLSR

Nodes in a mobile ad hoc network are typically battery-powered. Energy consumption is therefore an important metric to consider in designing routing protocols for such networks. In this paper, we present our work on integrating energy-efficiency aspects into a standard MANET routing protocol, OLSR. We study the impact of different protocol modifications that aim to increase node lifetime and network performance, and evaluate them under a range of different scenarios. For static networks, little to no performance improvements are achieved, but significant performance gains of 15% to 30% are possible for more dynamic network topologies. At the same time, not all modifications are equally beneficial. In particular, changing the MPR selection criteria, a key OLSR optimization mechanism, is not promising under any of the studied scenarios.