A comparative study of AODV and OLSR on the ORBIT testbed

Though ad hoc network routing protocols, such as AODV and OLSR, have been extensively studied through simulations, there have been fewer evaluations of their software protocol implementations on real network testbed deployments. Consequently, validating the protocol functionality and performance on an actual experimental platform is imperative in order to understand relative merits or limitations under different network conditions. In this paper, we present our initial experimental evaluations of the publicly available AODV and OLSR implementations on the national Open Access Research Testbed (ORBIT) for Next Generation Wireless Networks. We focused on the implementation issues involved in porting these protocols on an open-access testbed as well as the behavior of the proctols on the tested. Finally, we also looked at maximum achievable throughput using these protocols under different settings. Our preliminary observations indicate that in a static scenario, these two protocols can achieve comparable throughput, with AODV offering better stability than OLSR.