Analytical study of neighborhood discovery and link management in OLSR

In mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), neighborhood discovery and link management (NDLM) mechanism is used by each node to determine the set of its neighbors, or in other words, to establish one-hop links. Values of this mechanism parameters dramatically affect network performance, especially when real-time traffic is transmitted with proactive routing protocols, which imposes constraints on link quality, i.e. reliability, stability and decision-making latency. The efficiency of NDLM mechanisms is usually evaluated by simulation. The core contribution of this paper is an analytical study of NDLM mechanism defined in OLSR protocol specification. With the developed analytical model of the mechanism, we find the set of parameter values which allow to meet the constraints on link quality indices. By simulation, we show that the usage of these values improves the performance of the network loaded with voice traffic.