Performance evaluation of a cartography enhanced OLSR for mobile multi-hop ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose the integration of a cartography gathering scheme to enhance the capacity of the Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) to properly track node movements in dynamic networks. We propose an improved version of OLSR called the Cartography Enhanced Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (CE-OLSR), a novel routing protocol designed for mobile multi-hop ad hoc networks. Our contribution is three fold. First, we propose an efficient network cartography collection scheme solely based on OLSR signaling traffic. We show that this cartography is much richer than the mere topology gathered by the seminal OLSR. Second, we designed an enhanced version of OLSR based on the collected cartography. We show that CE-OLSR insures a much better responsiveness and copes appropriately with the mobility of nodes. Third, we conduct an extensive set of simulations to compare the performance of our proposal against that of OLSR. Simulations results show that the proposed CE-OLSR outperforms greatly OLSR in terms of a much better route validity, a much higher throughput and a much lower average delay. For instance, at a speed of 20 m/s, CE-OLSR achieves a route validity beyond 93% while that provided by OLSR barely attains 30%. At high speeds, CE-OLSR delivers more than 3 times the throughput of OLSR with an average end to end delay 21 times smaller. As such, CE-OLSR stands out not only as an appropriate routing protocol for mobile multi-hop ad hoc networks, but also a viable protocol for the transport of time critical data.