An Overlay Maintenance Protocol for Overlay Routing on Top of Ad Hoc Networks

The protocol described in this paper builds and maintains an overlay topology on top of an ad hoc network. The overlay is intended to be used by a routing application. As flooding is a key component of many route discovery mechanisms in MANETs, we evaluate the delivery percentage, bandwidth consumption and time duration of flooding a message on the overlay. We also consider the overlay path stretch as an indicator for the data transfer transmission time. The protocol does not require any information from the underlay routing protocol, nor cooperation from the nodes that do not belong to the overlay. Each overlay node maintains a set of nearest overlay nodes and exchanges its neighbourhood information with them in order to select useful overlay links. Resilience is afforded by setting a minimum number of overlay neighbours. The performance observed over OLSR are good, for all overlay densities and mobility level studied.