Semiring Pruning for Information Dissemination in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Link state routing mechanisms have shown good convergence behaviour in networks with mobile hosts. Compared to traditional link state mechanisms, which suffer from broadcast storm problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), pruned link state approaches such as those used in optimized link state routing (OLSR) have shown significant reduction in the control overhead. In this paper, we show that the pruning function is a fundamental component of link state routing protocols for MANETs, and develop a class of pruning methods for many commonly used routing objectives. We show that the ability of our local pruning methods to preserve optimal paths is a special case of the semiring distribution property.