A Method of Proactive MANET Routing Protocol Evaluation Applied to the OLSR Protocol

Abstract

Traditional evaluation studies of MANET routing protocols have concentrated on quantitative, traffic-based metrics like throughput and packet loss. These metrics provide a lim- ited evaluation of protocol performance because they do not measure how well the protocol finds and maintains routes, only how well functional routes perform, once established. This work proposes a method for assessing how well a proac- tive MANET routing protocol tracks the network topology by comparing the reported routes to the actual topology. This study exposes the impact of routing message propa- gation and message loss on MANET routing by showing the existence of errant routes and protocol-reported informa- tion, specifically broken routes, incorrect routing table hop counts, and existing routes that were not found by the pro- tocol. We use this approach to analyze the performance of the OLSR protocol in a medium-sized MANET, using data from the MANIAC Challenge. The results favor OLSR, but expose errant routes, how often they occur and for how long