Scalable Exchange of Packet Counters in OLSR

The HELLO messages of the OLSR protocol can be used as a way to exchange packet counters for each advertised link between the originating node and its neighbors. These counters are aimed to enable nodes receiving the HELLO messages to check that the property of flow conservation is verified on the originating node. The addition of this information incurs a significant overhead that could prevent the node from being able to advertise all its links in one HELLO message. Although plain OLSR has been designed to deal with partial information in its control messages, enabling the verification of the flow conservation property is not trivial. In this paper, we present a way to perform partial advertisement of packet counters and complete verification of the property of flow conservation that remains scalable. Simulation results show that in practical conditions, the use of the method incurs a limited overhead that makes it very acceptable.