Comparison studies of OSPF-MDR, OLSR and Composite Routing

In this paper, we investigate the benefits and tradeoffs among various routing strategies used in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). In particular, we compare the performance of OSPF-MDR, OLSR, and Composite Routing. Our composite routing implementation is based on further extensions of OSPF-MDR that employs OLSR as the sub-IP MANET routing protocol. The performance evaluation was conducted on an emulation test-bed that utilizes the light-weight Linux network stack virtualization, namely network namespaces. The performance results show that OLSR outperforms OSPF-MDR. As a result, composite routing can leverage OLSR to achieve better network performance than OSPF-MDR with less overhead. Furthermore, composite routing can significantly reduce routing updates to legacy networks due to MANET dynamics (by about 95% under high mobility).