A Cross-layer Enhancement of Geographical OLSR for MIMC-based Tactical Ad Hoc Networks

In the future combat networks, the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol is one of the proactive routing protocol considered to guarantee reliable data communication. However, the conventional OLSR and enhanced OLSR as OLSRv2 does not efficiently consider reducing control message overhead and route recovery delay in multi-interface multi-channel (MIMC) based cognitive radio environments. Lack of these features gives a limited routing performance in tactical mobile ad hoc networking systems equipped with multiple radios, mainly due to broadcast storming through multiple interfaces, unstable MPR selection, and route failure. To solve these problems, we propose an enhanced OLSR protocol, named as a Cross-layer based Geographical OLSR (CG-OLSR) that consists of two core algorithms for reducing control overhead based on a cross-layer approach, while enhancing route reliability with location awareness. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms not only the pure OLSR but also its variations in terms of control message overhead, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery ratio. Keywords-Tactical ad hoc networks, OLSR, Geographical routing, Cross-layer, Multiple Interface Multiple Channel