[wsfii-discuss] <newbie> olsr

Sun Sep 10 09:22:38 UTC 2006

Hello Every Body,
My name is Hitesh Shetty,
I wanted some information about OLSR.
Actually I have interest in the functioning of olsr.
I wanted to know as much about the olsr as possible.
Im quite familiar with some basics which I've read from books.

Allow me to transcript what I know and please correct me wherever appropriate.

Need for Ad-Hoc routing algorithms:

1) Traditional wired routing algo's will not work effeciently or fail
totally since these algorithms have not been designed for a highly
dynamic topology, assymetric links or interference.

2) Routing in ad-hoc n/w cannot rely on layer-3 alone, routing info
should be based on lower layers (radio links) for issues of
connectivity or interference.

3) A centralized approach can easily prove to be a bottle neck.

4) Many nodes need routing capabilities.

5) Ad-hoc networks would have to work mostly based on connectionless
principle, reason being that if a 3-way TCP handshake is established
for each and every request , with dynamic changing routing information
, establishment and maintenance of connection causes a lot of
overhead.

Existing Ad-Hoc routing algorithms:

1) AODV : - Ad-Hoc on demand distance vector (DSDV historically)
2) Dynamic Source Routing.

The above use number of hops as routing metric.
However other factors should also be considered for Ad-Hoc routing.

Some authors have mostly categorized Ad-Hoc routing into three categories :-
1) Flat ad-hoc routing.
2) hierarchical routing
3) geographic-position-assisted routing.

OLSR:
Open Link State Routing (OLSR) comes under Flat Ad-Hoc routing as a
proactive protocol. DSDV also belongs to this group. OLSR along with
Ad-Hoc routing also tries to reduce the traffic caused by link-state
information dissemination. Advantages of OLSR is that it gives QoS
guarantees as long as the topology does not change too
fast. Disadvantages is that it overheads a lightly loaded network.

What I need to know:
1) How is OLSR structured in terms of the C files it uses, (Im
assuming that it uses C) ?
2) What each file does individually and how they fit in the overall
scheme of things ?
3) What state is OLSR right now and what are the optimizations that
are applied to it or will be applied to it in the future ?
4) Any other information about OLSR which you think can be useful and
which I ought to know ?

Thaking you in advance,
Regards
Hitesh Shetty