Optimized Link State Routing Protocol - Criticisms

Criticisms

The original definition of OLSR does not include any provisions for sensing of link quality; it simply assumes that a link is up if a number of hello packets have been received recently. This assumes that links are bi-modal (either working or failed), which is not necessarily the case on wireless networks, where links often exhibit intermediate rates of packet loss. Implementations such as the open source OLSRd (commonly used on Linux-based mesh routers) have been extended (as of v. 0.4.8) with link quality sensing.

Being a proactive protocol, OLSR uses power and network resources in order to propagate data about possibly unused routes. While this is not a problem for wired access points, and laptops, it makes OLSR unsuitable for sensor networks that try to sleep most of the time. For small scale wired access points with low CPU power, the open source OLSRd project showed that large scale mesh networks can run with OLSRd on thousands of nodes with very little CPU power on 200 MHz embedded devices.

Being a link-state protocol, OLSR requires a reasonably large amount of bandwidth and CPU power to compute optimal paths in the network. In the typical networks where OLSR is used (which rarely exceed a few hundreds of nodes), this does not appear to be a problem.

By only using MPRs to flood topology information, OLSR removes some of the redundancy of the flooding process, which may be a problem in networks with moderate to large packet loss rates – however the MPR mechanism is self-pruning (which means that in case of packet losses, some nodes that would not have retransmitted a packet, may do so).