A Cross-layer design approach in OLSR MANET using BER and weighted Connectivity Index

Usually, Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol, a proactive routing protocols in MANET, is not aware of Quality of Service (QoS). Recently, the new approach called cross layer design has been proposed to improve the performance of wireless network, especially in MANET. In this work, we propose a heuristic approach based on cross layer design scheme to enhance performance of OLSR by using Bit Error Rate (BER) derived from physical layer together with a network layer parameter called weighted Connectivity Index (CI) which is a combination between the link connectivity and capacity. In our proposed heuristic algorithm, the approach is to find the optimized path in terms of highest weighted CI and lowest BER in order to improve the performance of Multipoint Relays (MPR) selection algorithm and route computation. The performances of the proposed scheme are investigated by simulation using Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio, Average End-to-End Delay and Control Overhead as evaluation metrics. We compare the simulation results of our proposed scheme with the standard OLSR protocol and OLSR with only weighted CI approach. According to the simulation results, it is obvious that our proposed scheme illustrates the improvement of OLSR on the afore-mentioned evaluation metrics over the standard OLSR protocol and OLSR with weighted CI.