[Babel-users] Reachability issue when multicast is less reliable than unicast

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Hi,

> I know Babel can now run over unicast addresses.

Yes, and I would welcome help testing this feature.

> How can I improve my babeld configuration to utilize the new feature?

First, you need to switch to branch "unicast":

  git checkout unicast

Then, rebuild babeld, and put the following in your /etc/babeld.conf:

  default unicast true

Please be aware that this branch is under active development, and it gets
rebased occasionally -- if something goes wrong, destroy your git
repository and make a new clone.  Please be also aware that it currently
doesn't do source-specific routing (if you don't know what that is, it's
not a problem for you.)

> (P.S. To my knowledge, multicast over Wi-Fi has lower transmission rate but no
> retry, thus also has different reliability compared to unicast. How much would
> babel's performance be affected over such networks?)

Currently, the "unicast" configuration will still use multicast for link
sensing, so there should be no issues.  We intend to work on link quality
estimation for pure unicast networks at some point.

-- Juliusz