A BAT in the Lab: Experimental Results of New Link State Routing Protocol

In this paper, we analyze the common problems of link state routing protocols along with an evolution of the Optimized Link State Routing protocol, called BATMAN. BATMAN uses a weighted and auto-selective flooding which makes it a sort of gossip protocol. The flooding uses short control packets to make every mesh node aware of network topology. However, there is no topology information dissemination and no multi-point relaying node selection. While routing loops are easily avoided by this modified flooding mechanism, there are still problems about self-interference. Due the broadcast nature of the radio channel, traffic data can disturb control data, and localized control data may cause interference on neighboring control data as well. In fact there is a complicated interaction between MAC and routing protocols. We demonstrate this fact by extensive field tests carried out by our measurement framework based on statistical tests. In particular, we show that the so called hop horizon of multi-hop network can be due to the routing and MAC protocols. These analysis can be a useful hint for the design of more intelligent routing, or rather a less cross-layer dependence of protocols.