TLSR: A tree link state routing protocol using message aggregation based on a skewed wait time assignment for infrastructure-based mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract The existing protocols for the Internet connectivity of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks suffer from a high overhead since they often rely on flooding in executing mobility management and/or route discovery. In this paper, we propose a tree link state routing protocol in which a mobility management protocol builds topology information at the Internet Gateway (IG) as well as manages mobile nodes using tree topology and a routing protocol exploits the topology information, tackling the inherent problem of the excessive control overhead which appears in link state routing protocols. The activities of routing protocol including the delivery of data packet and control message also help the update of the topology information. In this way, mobility management and routing protocol collaborate with each other to increase convergence speed of topology and reduce control overhead. In addition, the progressive path discovery and the message aggregation technique based on the skewed wait time assignment are employed to reduce control overhead of the nodes near the Internet Gateway that process much more data packets and control messages. Simulation results show that the proposed method far outperforms AODV-Hybrid and OLSR+.