[Babel-users] A peer-reviewed assessment of OLSR, BATMAN and Babel

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

I've just come upon an interesting paper that experimentally compares
the performance of OLSR, BATMAN and Babel.

    Real-world Performance of Current Proactive Multi-hop Mesh
    Protocols.  M. Abolhasan, B. Hagelstein, J. C.-P. Wang.

    http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1747&context=infopapers

Short summary: see Table II on the last page.


A few comments on the paper:

1. Section II (the informal description of the protocols) doesn't make
   much sense.  Ignore it.

2. They evaluated original OLSR, not OLSR-ETX as used by our friends in
   Vienna and Berlin.

3. The results in Figure 3 would appear to imply that there's a bug in
   Babel -- it loses a packet every time it switches routes.  I think
   I understand why.

4. They ran the routing daemons with the default parameters.  This means
   that BATMAN ran with an OGM interval of 1 second, while Babel used
   a Hello interval of 4 seconds.  It would have been interesting to see
   the results with similar parameters.

5. They didn't measure the amount of routing protocol traffic.

                                        Juliusz