| With the proliferation of high-performance mobile devices, there has been renewed interest in MANETs. This Dissertation focuses on the flooding methods used and the impact of stale topology information in the Optimized Link-State Routing protocol (OLSR), a widely used proactive MANET routing protocol. Specifically, we examine routing loops, black holes, and path stretch when the topology information is stale. We find that as the topology information becomes stale, OLSR suffers from all of these problems. Moreover, OLSR specifies some optimizations that exasperate these problems. As an alternative, we propose a simple approximate distance-based routing scheme that computes routes slightly differently than OLSR, and is less impacted by stale topology information. In particular, we prove the forwarding is loop-free under a mild condition. Routers can maintain this condition in a distributed fashion that results in far less overhead than OLSR. Flooding the information is crucial for routing protocols in MANET. We present performance models for the flooding algorithms presented in RFC 6621 and two forms of retransmission. A comparison of the flooding methods shows that Classic Flooding performs best for most scenarios. |
