Evaluation of the scalability of OLSRv2 in an emulated realistic military scenario

Emulation environments are an effective approach to experimenting with and evaluating network protocols, algorithms, and components. This paper describes a joint effort by the NATO Science & Technology Organization's IST-124 Research Task Group to evaluate the scalability of OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 in an emulation environment within a military scenario. The scenario includes detailed mobility patterns for a battalion-sized operation, which has been developed by military experts in planning and executing live exercises. The mobility patterns are used to drive the network emulation. The scalability of OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 (with and without MPR) is assessed by emulating different network sizes and estimating the overhead. Moreover, the unicast packet delivery ratio is calculated for the different OLSR configurations. The results show that with the chosen OLSR update rates, only OLSRv2 with MPR mechanism scales up to 96 nodes.