[ACM Press the 6th ACM international workshop - Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (2011.09.19-2011.09.19)] Proceedings of the 6th ACM international workshop on Wireless network testbeds, experimental evaluation and characterization - WiNTECH '11 - A method of proactive MANET routing protocol evaluation applied to the OLSR protocol

✍ Scribed by Thompson, Michael S.; MacKenzie, Allen B.; DaSilva, Luiz A.

• Book ID: 120995689
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2011
• Weight: 523 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1450308678
• DOI: 10.1145/2030718.2030726

✦ Synopsis

Traditional evaluation studies of MANET routing protocols have concentrated on quantitative, traffic-based metrics like throughput and packet loss. These metrics provide a limited 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 proactive MANET routing protocol tracks the network topology by comparing the reported routes to the actual topology. This study exposes the impact of routing message propagation and message loss on MANET routing by showing the existence of errant routes and protocol-reported information, specifically broken routes, incorrect routing table hop counts, and existing routes that were not found by the protocol. 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.