Evaluation of mesh routing protocols for wireless community networks

Authors: Axel Neumann, Ester López, Leandro Navarro

Status: published as A.Neumann et al., Evaluation of mesh routing protocols for wireless community networks, Computer Networks (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2015.07.018 local copy

Abstract:
In recent years we have witnessed an exponential growth of wireless community networks as a response to the clear necessity of Internet access for participation in society. For wireless mesh networks that can scale to up to thousands of nodes, owned and managed in a decentralized way, it is imperative for its survival to provide the network with self-management mechanisms that reduce the requirements of human intervention and technological knowledge in the operation of a community network. In this paper we focus on one important self-management mechanism, routing, and we study the scalability, performance and stability of three proactive mesh routing protocols: BMX6, OLSR and Babel.
We study different metrics on an emulation framework and on the W-ILab.T testbed at iMinds, making the most of the two worlds: emulation allows us to have more control over the topology and repeat more systematically the experiments; whereas a testbed provides a realistic wireless medium and more reliable measurements, specially in terms of interference and CPU consumption.
Results show the relative merits, costs and limitations of the three protocols.