Study on OSPF Routing Cost Functions for Wireless Environments

Recently, in network communication environments, it is changing very fast from wired to wireless. The open shortest path firtst (OSPF), one of link state routing protocols, mainly used in wired networks, is the routing method to select optimal traffic path as identifying the link state of neighbor routers. The traditional OSPF cost functions performs with first fixed cost permanently, unless the router link is changed. However, in wireless networks, the performance of links show big difference by other environment factors. The bit error rate (BER), a parameter which can quite affect link state in wireless networks, is not considered in the traditional OSPF cost functions. Only a link bandwidth is considered in the traditional OSPF cost functions. In this paper, we verify the various parameters which can affect link performance, whether it is permissible to use as the parameter of proposed cost functions. To propose new cost functions, we use the effective bandwidth. This bandwidth is calculated by proposed formula using the BER of the network link and link bandwidth. As applied by the proposed triggering condition, the calculated effective bandwidth decrease the unstable of network by generating less link state update messages in wireless networks that frequently changes the link state. Simulation results show that the proposed cost functions significantly outperforms the traditional cost functions in wireless networks in terms of the services of VoIP and data transmission.