Improving the quality of service routing in OLSR protocol

Abstract

In this paper we propose an approach to improve the quality of service (QoS) routing in the optimized link state routing protocol. The OLSR protocol operates generally in a best effort mode by finding the shortest path between a source and a destination without any quality of service consideration. We argue that an optimal path is not always the shortest path, and based on the network configuration and load, other alternatives such as a longer path with a high bandwidth might be of a better interest. To provide such alternatives and improve the communication quality among end users, our approach proposes to perform at each node an estimation of the bandwidth share between all adjacent nodes and tends to ensure the selection of a path with all MPRs that provide a higher bandwidth along the path. The bandwidth share estimation on each link is based on the study of conflict graphs to derive the set of maximal cliques. Once the bandwidth share estimation is done, instead of choosing the shortest path following the usual heuristic in OLSR, we try to find the path that ensures the highest bandwidth among all possible paths between the source node and the destination node. Results from simulation experiments show that the proposed approach achieves a higher performance than the standard OLSR used in wireless mesh networks.