Making OLSR Aware of Resources

An important element of any routing protocol used for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is the link cost function used to represent the radio link characteristic. The majority of the routing protocols for WMNs attempt to accurately characterise the radio link quality by constructing the link cost function from the measurements obtained using active probing techniques which introduces overhead. In this paper we present a modified version of the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol which uses the link cost function values provided the Resource Aware Routing for mEsh (RARE) module which employs passive monitoring to gather radio link information. This results in a smaller overhead than the other methods that require active network probing and furthermore is load independent since it does not require an access to the medium. We demonstrate the necessary modifications to OLSR required to make it work with RARE. The results of our ns-2 simulations show that such a combination (OLSR + RARE) performs well over various wireless topologies.