Performance of OLSR in MANETs with Cross-Layer Metrics and TCP/UDP Flows

This paper investigates traffic related performance for TCP/UDP-based traffic flows in a MANET powered by OLSR with various routing metrics. Besides the ETX (expected transmission count), an alternative is proposed that resorts on a cross-layer approach to obtain PER (packet error rate) estimates from the physical layer. Throughput and latency performance are evaluated for various configurations of traffic flows and network size in a specifically developed simulation environment. It is seen that the PER-based alternative may outperform the ETX-based alternative in most configurations, by providing better support for transport layer protocol behaviours (e.g. TCP window size).