Overview and optimization of flooding techniques in OLSR

During this last decade, mesh networks have experienced strong growth due to their ability to provide an additional and complementary support for existing infrastructure communication systems. In such a network, routers are supposed to be fixed for short (e.g. public safety deployment) or long (e.g. network operator extension) period. This relative stability of infrastructure makes proactive routing protocols appropriate. One of the well known proactive routing protocols is OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing), which routing decisions are based on exchanges of topology information using all-to-all flooding of local information in order for each router to build a global knowledge of the topology. This study first goal is to improve the performance of topology information flooding in OLSR by introducing network coding techniques, which leads to a decrease of signaling overhead.