MOLSR : Mobile-Agent-Based Optimized Link State Routing Protocol

Abstract

Given the unpredictability of the wireless medium, one of the major challenges in Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) remains to be the efficiency of the underlying routing protocol. One of the common routing protocols currently used in MANETs is Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR). To maintain the topology information at each node, OLSR uses a smart ooding algorithm called multipoint relay (MPR). Instead of using blind broadcasting where each node sends a control message to all its neighbors, MPR selects a small set of nodes to do the broadcasting such that all network nodes are covered. In this project we propose an approach, MOLSR, which uses mobile agents (MA) to maintain the MANET topology information. MOLSR completely replaces MPR and integrates seamlessly with OLSR for the purpose of improving network performance. In the proposed approach, every node creates and launches a MA that intelligently travels the network and returns to its launcher with the full topology. In case a MA is lost along its journey, MOLSR automatically recovers the MA and makes sure it proceeds to cover the whole network. The major advantage of MOLSR over MPR is using unicast instead of broadcast. Extensive simulations were conducted using NS3 to compare the performance of MOLSR vs. MPR. The MA was implemented using LUA scripting language and integrated within NS3. The metric used for comparison includes: the number of messages exchanged in the network, the tra c volume exchanged in the network, delay, and throughout.