bmx6

Evaluation of mesh routing protocols for wireless community
networks

Abstract
In recent years, we have witnessed the 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, which are owned and
managed in a decentralized way, it is imperative for their 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, perfor-
mance, 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 more systematically repeat the experiments, whereas a testbed provides a
realistic wireless medium and more reliable measurements, especially in terms of interference
and CPU consumption. Results show the relative merits, costs, and limitations of the three
protocols.
Keywords: mesh routing, wireless community networks, BMX6, OSLR, Babel