Extended Multicast Optimized Link State Routing Protocol in MANETs with Asymmetric Links

Optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol has been presented as a proactive unicast routing protocol tailored for mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). With some modifications, the multicast optimized link state routing protocol (MOLSR) is applied to multicast data dissemination. However, both OLSR and MOLSR protocols presuppose the presence of symmetric links between node pairs in the network. In reality, MANETs may consist of asymmetric links connecting heterogeneous nodes. Motivated by the efficient utilization of the limited radio resources, we make extensions of MOLSR to MOLSR-ASYM aiming to take the best use of the asymmetric links. Our simulation results demonstrate that with the marginally increased signaling cost, our proposed approach is effective to improve the multicast routing in providing more and shorter routes for route selection and data transmission.