Optimized utilization of Proactive Routing Protocol in Tactical MANET scenario

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) comprises of wireless communication nodes that are disseminated arbitrarily and form dynamic topology for communication. Routing protocols play a key role in determining the optimal route between source to destination and forwarding the packet from source to destination for out-of-range packet disseminations. In MANET the choice of routing protocol is important due to the movability of the nodes because the routing protocols can highly impact the performance of MANET. In MANET routing has to cater for parameters like minimum route acquisition latency, low overhead, limited bandwidth and support for multiple services. This paper highlights the optimized utilization of the dynamic proactive routing protocol OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) v2 to meet the QoS (Quality of Service) requirements in a tactical communication scenario. OLSR v2 uses MPR (Multi Point Relay) for transmitting unicast data, broadcast data and PTT as well as IP based voice for meeting their latency requirements. This paper also analyses how cross layer optimizations can be done to reduce the control overhead in wireless MANET routing.