How to Reduce and Stabilize MPR sets in OLSR networks

MPR selection is one of the most important and critical functions of OLSR. The OLSR standard specifies an algorithm that has good local properties in terms of number of MPR selected but does not use available information in order to reduce the global number of MPR nodes. MPR selection affects many network properties, from the actual logical topology, to the routing efficiency, to the protocol overhead and the broadcast/multicast delivery. This paper proposes and evaluates two simple modifications to the MPR selection strategy, which are oriented to global properties rather than local â˜optimalityâ. The results presented show that even marginal modifications of the heuristic lead to a performance improvement, with, for instance, a reduction of up to 15% in the number of control messages required to maintain the topology, a relevant gain specially when obtained without introducing any overhead in control messages