OSPF-style database exchange and reliable synchronization in the optimized link-state routing protocol

The optimized link-state routing protocol (OLSR) is a proactive link-state routing protocol. While similar to the well-known Internet routing protocol OSPF, OLSR is designed to be simple, and to maintain connectivity in face of highly dense and dynamic networks, while being resource-economic (battery, bandwidth etc.) These characteristics make OLSR suitable as an underlaying routing protocol in a wide range of ad-hoc sensor networks. In this paper, we introduce an extension to OLSR: OSPF-style database exchange and reliable synchronization. The goal of this extension is to provide a mechanism, through which nodes in an ad-hoc sensor network can detect and correct discrepancies in their link-state databases. We qualify why the mechanism, found in OSPF, is not directly applicable for ad-hoc sensor networks, describe an adopted mechanism, accomplishing the same goal, and evaluate the performance of this mechanism in comparison to the database exchange mechanism found in OSPF. We finally discuss some applications of database exchange and reliable synchronization in ad-hoc sensor networks.