Efficient Dissemination Techniques for MANET Routing Control Messages

The challenges of optimal flooding of network control messages in Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) have been well studied in the literature [2]-[10] and [12]-[19]. A particular case of this problem is encountered in MANET routing protocols, which need to distribute routing control information to all member nodes as efficiently as possible. While both proactive and reactive MANET routing protocols exist, in some environments a proactive approach will be used to reduce communications latency as much as possible. Even in a hybrid protocol, the proactive portion requires some amount of information exchange among all nodes. Many previous papers have discussed optimal flooding in a variety of environments under a variety of assumptions, but none have assessed the performance of a recently developed cluster based routing protocol called Adaptive Hybrid Domain Routing (AHDR). In this paper, the optimal flooding architecture developed for the clustered based AHDR protocol is discussed in detailed. The paper also compares AHDR's flooding architecture against two prominent MANET routing protocols, OLSR [3] and OSPFMDR [11]. The paper also shows simulation results for each of the flooding architectures using an unbiased and non-intrusive monitoring technique. The performance results show that AHDR's flooding architecture imposes lower overhead control traffic as compared to OLSR and OSPF-MANET-MDR while still providing better network reachability.