Multi-point relay selection strategies to reduce topology control traffic for OLSR protocol in MANETs

Reducing Topology Control (TC) traffic is one of the most important issues that need to be considered for routing protocols. Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) is one of the most popular routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), in OLSR each node disseminates TC messages throughout the MANET. Individual nodes use this information to compute routes to all destinations. In order to reduce TC messages overheads, OLSR uses a Multipoint Relays (MPR) selection algorithm. In this article, we propose two strategies to improve the MPR selection algorithm for further reducing the number of TC messages. The proposed strategies are used to select MPR by using a simple modification in OLSR protocol without additional signaling overheads. Implementation and simulation experiments with NS2 Network Simulator are presented in order to validate our proposal. The results show that our enhanced OLSR variants outperform original OLSR and cooperative OLSR in terms of number of TC messages and routing cost.