bmx6

Title: Analysis of the BMX6 routing protocol
Author: Glenn Daneels

Abstract:
This thesis investigates the BMX6 protocol which is a distance-vector routing protocol especially designed for mesh networks. Due to its novelty, the BMX6 protocol is not standardized or properly documented yet. However, interesting features like the optimized way of communicating and the possibility to add extensions to the protocol, make BMX6 a very promising protocol.
This thesis will provide a documentation on the protocol. The key features of the protocol are discussed, as is the function of each frame and the interaction with other frames. Each frame structure is visually shown and the function of every field is explained. Other aspects, e.g. all the possible options are included, some technical aspects for installment and the use of the protocol are touched. This thesis also provides other researchers, who want to further analyze the source code, essential knowledge about some key internal processes of the protocol.
As there are already large community networks like Guifi.net that are using BMX6 and also other types of mesh networks are becoming more popular, analyzing its performance against other used protocols like OLSR is crucial. Therefore, 4 different types of experiments were executed for both BMX6 and OLSR in function of the topology size: the start-up of a network, the steady state of the network, adding a new node to the network and adding of new link to the network. BMX6 showed better results on the 4 different types of experiments than OLSR. Especially from the steady state experiment results, it is clear that the optimized communication scheme in BMX6 is protocol overhead efficient and that the protocol scales better than OLSR.

Promotor: Pr. Dr. C. Blondia
Supervisor: Dr. Bart Braem

PDF: http://bmx6.net/attachments/download/134/Thesis_AnalysisOfTheBMX6RoutingProtocol_GlennDaneels.pdf