Performance Comparison of OLSR Protocol by Experiments and Simulations for Different TC Packet Intervals

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) have an increased interest in applications for covering rural areas due to the possibility of usage of low-cost and high-performance mobile terminals, without having to depend on the network infrastructure. MANET terminals are mobile and routes change dynamically, so routing algorithms are an important issue for operation of MANETs. Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) is a widely-used proactive routing protocol for MANET. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of OLSR Protocol for different values of TC packet interval time by experiments and simulations. We conduct experiments in a MANET test bed and simulations in QualNet environment. The performance is investigated for different number of hops, different TC interval values and two scenarios. From results we found that the low value of TC packet interval increases the throughput performance. While in case of experiments, the throughput is decreased because the route changes very often.