A Reference Implementation of a Greedy Coverage-Based Relay Selection Algorithm

Application to Multi-Point Relay (MPR) Selection in OLSR

This repository provides a reference implementation of the canonical greedy coverage-based relay selection algorithm used for Multi-Point Relay (MPR) selection in the Optimized Link-State Routing (OLSR) protocol. The implementation demonstrates the core MPR selection logic in a clear and reusable form and is not intended to provide a complete routing protocol implementation.

Algorithm overview

The relay (MPR) selection process is performed in two steps:

1. First-hop neighbors that uniquely cover second-hop neighbors (i.e., second-hop nodes reachable via exactly one first-hop neighbor) are selected mandatorily.

2. Additional first-hop neighbors are then selected iteratively based on maximum remaining second-hop coverage.

The algorithm terminates once all second-hop neighbors are covered by the selected relay (MPR) set.

This implementation operates on two-hop neighborhood information in order to match OLSR requirements. The underlying greedy coverage formulation is not inherently limited to two hops and can be extended to k-hop coverage by redefining the selector and target node sets.

Intended use

This code is intended for:

• Reference and educational use
• Reproducible evaluation of MPR selection logic
• Baseline comparison for enhanced or weighted MPR selection schemes
• Relay or forwarder selection studies in distributed and multi-hop networks

Implementation notes and requirements

• The demo script (Selector.m) generates a random connected network using MATLAB graph utilities. Network generation may retry multiple times until a connected graph is obtained.
• The MPR selector node is chosen uniformly at random.
• The implementation uses the datasample function; therefore, the MATLAB Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox is required.

If this toolbox is not available, the following equivalent base-MATLAB replacement can be used without changing the algorithm’s behavior:

mpr_selector = node_ids(randi(numel(node_ids)));

How to cite

If you use this code in academic work, please cite:

Mahdi Saleh, “MPR Selection in OLSR Protocol,” 2020.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29685.60640