ISCSEE 65

Adaptive Power Saving OLSR Based on Network Traffic in Wireless

Sensor Network
Muhammad Hamka Ibrahima,*,Soo Young Shinb
a,*
Kumoh National Institute of Technology
E-mail address: hamka@kumoh.ac.kr
b
Kumoh National Institute of Technology
E-mail address: wdragon@kumoh.ac.kr

ABSTRACT
As proactive routing protocol, OLSR yields high message overhead due to sending hello and
topology message within certain interval. By increasing message interval, message overhead
can be reduced. In the other hand, increasing message interval may cause packet loss due to
routing error. Best throughput can be achieved by setting the message interval to the lowest
value. Meanwhile, when there is no data traffic, frequently sending hello message is not
energy efficient at the cost of transmission power. We propose a method to reduce power
consumption by adjusting hello interval value considering the data traffic of OLSR nodes.
When there is no data traffic, our algorithm will reduce overhead message transmission.
Simulation result confirms that our algorithm can reduce overhead traffic and reduce power
consumption in 802.15.4 transceiver. We also confirm that by using proposed method, data
throughput can still be maintained by preventing it from routing error. To cope with energy
and throughput trade off, we also show the effectiveness of proposed method by showing the
energy per received bit performance.

Keyword: adhoc network, MANET, 802.15.4, routing protocol, wireless sensor network

1. INTRODUCTION

Proactive routing protocol use similar approaches as used in wired network. Proactive routing
maintains a number of routing table to store route information which needs to be updated
regularly. Every node has the node information in the network or subnet along with the node
range.

Network topology changes is one of the key issue in proactive routing as these protocols
needs to maintain up-to-date topology. Update need to be propagated to the entire network to
notify the changes occurred. Most of the proactive routing protocols use mechanisms which
are derived from wired network backbone. So a number of modification and improvements
has been carried out to cope with the dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc network. One of the
key characteristics of MANET proactive protocols is to maintain route update whether any
traffic exist or not in the network. It makes the network load high which can be seen as a
disadvantages of proactive routing [1]

OLSR is a table-driven proactive protocol and its operation mainly consist of updating and
maintaining information in 1-hop, 2-hop neighbour table and routing table. OLSR decreases
topology control (TC) message overheads of link state routing by flooding these messages
through subset of neighbours, called Multi-Point-Relay (MPRs). OLSR reduces number of
redundant link by covering all 2-hop neighbour through selected MPR as shown in Figure 1.

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As proactive routing protocol, OLSR yields high message overhead due to sending hello and
topology message within certain interval. By increasing message interval, message overhead
can be reduced. In the other hand, increasing message interval may cause packet loss due to
routing error. OLSR improvement by using mobility prediction has been presented in [2][3].
Overhead reduction by using dynamic overhead interval has been presented by Larsen et al
[4]. Author in [5] shows the effects of message interval and packet loss. It shows that better
throughput can be achieved by setting the message interval to the lowest value. Meanwhile,
when there is no data traffic, sending hello message frequently is not energy efficient at the
cost of transmission power.

We propose a method to adjust hello interval value considering the data traffic of OLSR
nodes, so the nodes will be energy efficient when there is no traffic. In this paper we shows
that the adaptive methods reduce the power consumption of nodes. We also show that there
is no data throughput degradation while using this scheme.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of OLSR routing
protocol. A system model of proposed scheme is given in Section 3, while simulation result is
presented in Section 4. The conclusion and future works of this paper is set out in Section 5.

2. OPTIMIZED LINK STATE ROUTING PROTOCOL

OLSR as described in request for comment [6] is a table-driven proactive protocol and its
operation mainly consist of updating and maintaining information in 1-hop, 2-hop neighbour
table and routing table. OLSR decreases topology control (TC) message overheads of link
state routing by flooding these messages through subset of neighbours, called
Multi-Point-Relay (MPRs). OLSR reduces number of redundant link by covering all 2-hop
neighbour through selected MPR as shown in Figure 1.

a) Adhoc network b) Adhoc network using OLSR

Figure 7: OLSR reduces number of redundant link in adhoc network [7].

OLSR defines three type of overhead messages,

 HELLO Messages: These messages are used for neighbour sensing and MPR
calculations. These are transmitted periodically to all its 1-hop neighbours. HELLO
message includes link type, willingness of node to become MPR, information about
its neighbours etc. Link type in these messages indicates that link is symmetric ,
asymmetric or simply lost
 Topology Control Messages: These messages are used to construct routing table.
These are link state messages, broadcasted periodically in entire networks.
 Multiple Interface Declaration (MID) Messages: These messages are transmitted by
nodes running OLSR on more than one interface.

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OLSR maintains one shortest path entry in routing table for every node in networks. When a
node has a data packet to forward, it reads the entry from its routing table and forwards the
packet to the nest hop, defined in routing table
One of the key of OLSR protocol is MPR selection. The algorithm of MPR selection as
described in [8][9] is stated as follow,
Suppose u is a node in OLSR network. Each point u has to select its set of MPR . Select
in the 1-neighbourhood of u(N1(u)) a set of nodes as small as possible which covers the
whole 2-neighbourhood of u(N2(u)), in two steps:
 Step 1 : Select nodes of N1(u) which cover isolated points of N2(u)
 Step 2 : Select among the nodes N1(u) not selected at the first step, the node which
covers the highest number of points (not already covered) of N2(u) and go on till
every points of N2(u) are covered.

When topology change occurred, new MPR selection is made. MPR selection needs overhead
transmission which yields more energy. Frequent overhead transmission also improve
reliability and throughput of OLSR network in dynamic topology, But using frequent
overhead transmission is not energy effiecient especially for node which does not require
frequent data transmission. This tradeoff is the main idea of our proposed methods.

3. SYSTEM MODEL

We define two kinds of node state types, active state nodes and passive nodes. Active nodes is
defined as nodes that process data transmission, data reception or data forwarding when being
selected as router. Passive state nodes is defined as nodes which has no data transmission,
reception or forwarding. Figure 2 shows the node states within certain time period.

Figure 8: Node state of proposed OLSR nodes in certain slot time interval

State change can be represented as state diagram shown in Figure 3. When there is data to
transmit, a node immediately change to active state. The state of nodes that receive data
becomes active as well. It also become active state when a node being a router of data
transmission. When there is no data transmission, reception and forwarding, a nodes become

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passive nodes. We use timer to determine no data traffic with timeout ttimeout When the timer
is time out t < ttimeout the state becomes passive.

Figure 9: State Diagram of proposed algorithm

When a node becomes active, it reduces the value of hello interval, so it sends hello message
more frequently. Although it will induce higher message overhead, the packet loss is reduced
due to smaller routing error. When a node become passive, it increase hello interval, so that it
spends less energy for transmission. The algorithm of proposed method is described as
follow.

Algorithm 1 Energy Saving Algorithm

Require: Boolean node state Data_Transmission, Data_Reception, Data_Forwarding,
Node_Idle
Initialize hello interval h = hmax
If state = PASSIVE then
If (Data_Transmission or Data_Reception or Data_Forwarding) then
h  hmin
state  ACTIVE
end if
else
state  state
end if
if state = ACTIVE then
if Node_Idle then
start timer t
if t > ttimeout then
h  hmax
state  PASSIVE
else
state  state
end if
else
state  state
end if
end if

4. SIMULATION RESULT

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We propose a method to adjust hello interval value considering the data traffic of OLSR
nodes, The system is a network in MANET environment which consists communication
between mobile nodes through adhoc networks. We use OPNET as network simulator. The
simulation is set up using parameter in Table 1.

Parameter Value
Number of Node 20
Mobility Random Waypoint
Area 300 x 300 m
Packet Sizes 5 kilobytes
Packet Interarrival time 10 seconds
Simulation time 500 seconds
Idle timeout ttimeout 5 seconds
Minimum hello interval hmin 2 seconds
Maximum hello interval hmax 10 seconds
Table 3: Simulation Parameter

The simulation runs by selecting n random nodes as a transmitter nodes. The transmitter
nodes then transmit data to random destination with parameters shown in Table 1. With
OLSR routing algorithm is implemented in each node, they transmit OLSR routing overhead
accordingly. For comparison, we set up simulation of network with hello interval value 2
seconds and 10 seconds. In our proposed algorithm, we set hmin = 2 seconds and hmax = 10
seconds.
Throughput (kbps)

Adapti
ve

Number of transmission nodes

Figure 10: Simulation result of network throughput

In Figure 4, we shows that when hello intervals is reduced to 10 seconds, data throughput is
decreased. This is caused by route error due to topology changes. However, our algorithm has
no throughput degradation, even it is higher than 2-second hello interval scheme. This
superiority is caused by smaller data collision caused by other node which is being passive
node.

Furthermore, we investigate the effect of reducing overhead to power consumption of the

nodes. Through simulation, we implements our algorithm in 802.15.4 transceiver. We
calculate the total power consumption as follow,
ETotal = tidle.Pidle + ttx.Ptx + trx.Prx (1)

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where tidle, ttx, and trx are slot of idle time, transmission time and reception time. Pidle , Ptx, .Prx
is idle power, transmission power and reception power. We use 802.15.4 energy parameter
described in [10] as shown in Table 2.
Parameter Value
Idle Power Pidle 712 uW
Transmission Power 31.32 mW
Ptx
Table 4: 802.15.4 Reception Power Prx 35.28 mW Power
Consumption Parameter

Figure 5 shows the total energy consumed by all nodes in network. It shows that smaller hello
interval value consumes most energy. It is because overhead size is bigger, so that it
consumes more energy consumption for overhead transmission. The higher hello interval
consumes least energy, but according to Figure 4 it has throughput degradation. Our
algorithm consumes less energy because of smaller overhead size compared to
2-seconds-hello interval scheme, while it still maintain data throughput performance.
Energy (mAh)

Adaptiv
e

Number of transmission nodes

Figure 5:Simulation result of Energy Consumption

We use energy per received bit as performance metric to investigate the effectiveness of
adaptive algorithm to reduce power consumption against data throughput. Figure 6 shows
that in less number of transmitting nodes, adaptive algorithm gives better effectiveness in
power consumption. When the number of transmission nodes is high, adaptive algorithm give
the same effectiveness with frequent hello interval transmission scheme. The proposed
method is effective when it is used in smaller network accordingly.

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 Figure 11: Simulation result of Energy per Received bit

5. CONCLUSION

We proposed modified OLSR with adaptively adjust overhead interval in MANET network.
In our algorithm, we adjust the overhead interval based on data traffic existence. By using our
algorithm, the overhead size of OLSR routing is decreased, while it is still maintaining data
throughput by preventing routing error. We also shows that our proposed algorithm can
reduce energy consumption of 802.15.4 transceiver. Our proposed algorithm can be a good
solution to a MANET network with a low traffic demand and low power consumption device.
For future works, the proposed OLSR scheme can be implemented in WLAN and VANET.
Investigation and analysis of performance under data traffic variation is also left for future
works. The adaptive algorithm still can be developed by modifying the interval value of hello,
TC messages, MID messages or combination of them.

Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National
Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology(2012R1A1A1009442).

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