The impact of topology update strategies on the performance of a proactive MANET routing protocol

Although there have been a number of performance studies of proactive mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols, little attention has been paid to the impacts of topology update strategies on routing performance. This paper presents an analysis of several topology update strategies for a proactive MANET routing protocol. The goal of this paper is to better understand how topology update strategies can contribute to topology maintenance in proactive MANETs and thus impact the overall performance, based on simulations involving optimised link state routing (OLSR), a popular MANET protocol. Our contribution includes (1) a quantitative analysis of the impacts of proactive update intervals on the routing performance of OLSR; (2) evaluating the performance of reactive topology updates and proactive updates for OLSR.