Performance Comparison of AODV and OFLSR in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are the next step in the evolution of wireless architecture, delivering wireless services for a large variety of applications in personal, local, campus, and metropolitan areas. Unlike WLANs, Mesh networks are self-configuring systems where each Access Point (AP) can relay messages on behalf of others, thus increasing the range and available bandwidth. Therefore, the key advantages of wireless mesh networks include ease of installation, no cable costs, automatic connection among all nodes, network flexibility, automatic discovery of newly added nodes, redundancy and self-healing reliability. Given the increasing interest on wireless mesh architectures, a new IEEE working group, 802.11s was recently created with the purpose to standardize an architecture and protocol that support both broadcast/multicast and unicast delivery over self-configuring multi-hop topologies between APs. In this paper, we present a detailed simulation study of the performance of the predominant mesh routing protocols being considered in IEEE 802.11s: Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR). Moreover, for large-scale wireless mesh networks, we gracefully integrate advantages of OLSR and Fisheye routing protocol (FSR). Results show that OFLSR provides better scalability in terms of traffic load and host mobility than AODV in mesh networks.