Reducing MANET neighborhood discovery overhead

Routing in MANETs still is a challenging task. Especially for proactive protocols where nodes periodically send control messages, a vast amount of the available data rate is used for link detection and the dissemination of topology information. Numerous enhancements to existing routing protocols to reduce the overhead caused by control messages have been proposed. Most of them use complex algorithms or keep track of previous messages. Due to the complexity and sometimes requirements for special hardware or information sources, none of these extensions are widely used. Therefore, we propose two extensions which are simple to implement yet provide significant overhead reduction for typical control messages. The first extension removes unnecessary bytes and redundancy from control messages. The second extension introduces smaller messages sent as replacements when the information did not change since the last message. Both extensions can be used in parallel or individually, providing a good amount of overhead reduction while being simple to implement and integrate.