bmx6

Title: Evaluation of Dynamic Routing Protocols on Realistic Wireless Topologies

Abstract:
Community Networks are consolidating themselves as a valid model to extend the edges of the Internet. As a result of efforts to overcome specific problems in this new model, communities have developed very interesting ideas and solutions in many fields. Nevertheless, the research community has so far paid marginal attention to them. As a consequence, not only is there a lack of references evaluating the performance of the routing protocols for IPv6 in real-life scenarios, but other interesting proposals such as BatMan-eXperimental version 6 (BMX6) remain completely unstudied.

The routing protocol selection is one of the most critical choices any community must make prior to any hardware deployment, in the delicate moment when the community is just starting to form. In our opinion, in such cases, an exhaustive evaluation of the performance of the available routing protocols would ease this selection process.

In an effort to contribute in this direction, this dissertation first analyses the topology and link characteristics of a well-known Community Network (guifi.net). In a second step, this new knowledge is used to parametrise an emulation environment in order to reflect relevant attributes of a real wireless CN and to study the performance (in terms of protocol overhead and convergence time) of the Babel, BMX6 and OLSR routing protocols for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).