Resilience-Driven Parameterisation of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols: olsrd as a Case Study

Ad hoc routing protocols are threatened by a variety of accidental and malicious faults that limit their use. Although a number of well-known strategies exist to enhance the performance and resilience of such type of protocols, their final effectiveness strongly relies on the usage of appropriate protocol configuration parameters. This paper investigates how to parameterise ad hoc routing protocols to combine high performance, with acceptable levels of resilience and low consumption of resources. The research places the spotlight on olsrd, an ad hoc proactive routing protocol able to run on real devices and deploy challenge-response authentication, packet signature and fault tolerance strategies at runtime. The reported practical experience is carried out in different ad hoc networking contexts integrating different types of devices, thus checking the influence that mobility of nodes and device resource constraints have on the parameterisation of the different protocol features considered.