Selecting an appropriate routing protocol for in-field MANEMO experiments

Despite years of research in ad hoc routing protocols, only a few have been investigated in the context of MANEMO (MANET for NEMO), which provides a hierarchical structured network and global connectivity. Motivated by the deployment of post-disaster MANEMOs composed of mobile routers and stations, we evaluate two candidate routing protocols through analytical models, simulation, and field experiments. The first protocol is the widely adopted Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR) and the second is the combination of the Tree Discovery Protocol (TDP) with Network In Node Advertisement (NINA). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that these two protocols are compared in both theoretical and practical terms. We focus on the control overhead generated when nodes perform a handover. Our results confirm the correctness and operational robustness of both protocols. More interestingly, although in the general case OLSR leads to better results, TDP/NINA outperforms OLSR in the case of sparse networks, which corresponds to the operation point of our target scenario.