[Olsr-dev] reliable vs unreliable updates

[David Murray]

Hi,

I'm writing this because I am interested in understanding why mesh routing
protocols send unreliable/unacknowledged TC updates. Modern day wired
routing protocols such as OSPF and EIGRP both use reliable updates. As OLSR
is designed for unreliable wireless networks it therefore seems a little
strange that we have moved to unreliable updates.

It seems that the number one problem for link state routing is having the LS
databases desynchronised. I have read that OLSR compensates for its
unreliability by sending redundant TC messages. If we could send
acknowledgements reliably then surely we could reduce the number of TC
messages that need to be sent. This would mean that the increased overhead
of acknowledgements, used to provide reliable TC messages, would not be as
great as they may initially appear.

I read on the wikipedia page for OLSR that using reliable updates in
wireless mesh networks is much more difficult to implement than in
traditional protocols. Is this the main reason? Why is this?

Thanks for your time
Dave
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.olsr.org/pipermail/olsr-dev/attachments/20091029/ca1745be/attachment.html>