On The Recovery Performance of Single- and Multipath OLSR in Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

International audienceIn this paper, we study and improve the recovery properties of single and multipath routing strategies when facing network failure situations. In particular, we focus our study on two MANET routing protocols: OLSR and its multipath extension MP-OLSR. In various wireless multi-hop network environments, especially in multiple chain topologies, we define and seek to evaluate the latency introduced by these protocols to find a new path after a link failure. Theoretical estimations and simulation results show that, under dual chain-topologies, this latency can be too long and incompatible with the needs of loss and delay constrained applications. As the source nodes cannot detect link failures immediately because of the delay incurred by the well-known nature of link state protocols in general, and of OLSR Topology Control (TC) messages in particular, these nodes keep sending packets along broken paths. We thus study the inconsistencies between the actual network topology and the nodes' own representation. After analyzing the consequences of this long latency, we seek to alleviate these problems with the introduction of adapted mechanisms. We propose three new different schemes and accordingly extend the original OLSR and MP-OLSR protocols in order to decrease the expected latency and improve the protocol performance. Simulation results show a steep decrease of the latency when using these new schemes in dual chain-topologies. We also discuss these results in terms of packet loss, end-to-end delay and overhead

Performance Evaluation of Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks with Embedded Systems

Many commercial wireless mesh network (WMN) products are available in the marketplace with their own proprietary standards, but interoperability among the different vendors is not possible. Open source communities have their own WMN implementation in accordance with the IEEE 802.11s draft standard, Linux open80211s project and FreeBSD WMN implementation. While some studies have focused on the test bed of WMNs based on the open80211s project, none are based on the FreeBSD. In this paper, we built an embedded system using the FreeBSD WMN implementation that utilizes two channels and evaluated its performance. This implementation allows the legacy system to connect to the WMN independent of the type of platform and distributes the load between the two non-overlapping channels. One channel is used for the backhaul connection and the other one is used to connect to the stations to wireless mesh network. By using the power efficient 802.11 technology, this device can also be used as a gateway for the wireless sensor network (WSN)