Assessing the Expected Performance of the OLSR Routing Protocol for Denser Urban Core Ad Hoc Network Deployments

The wide-scale adoption of smart phones has begun to provide a pragmatic real-world deployment environments for mobile ad hoc networks, (i.e., as peer-to-peer game platforms, for emergency services, etc.). Such deployments are likely to occur with urban cores where device densities would easily exceed those that have traditionally been studied. Moreover, the quality of the resulting solutions will innately rest on the capabilities of the underlying routing protocols. Of current protocols, the OLSR proactive routing protocol makes the strongest arguments regarding its suitability to such larger, denser network environments. This work tests OLSR's true suitability by analyzing its performance within a 360-node network existing within a standard 1 km ×1.5 km communications area, (i.e., innately for a network with approximately 3 × the node densities typically studied). It is shown that OLSR largely fails for such denser networks, with these failure arising due to OLSR's underlying presumption that routing tables updates should occur relatively infrequently. This limitation within OLSR has not been previously reported and this work highlights the reasons why these issues were likely not observed within prior OLSR studies.