Performance Evaluation of BATMAN Routing Protocol for VoIP Services: A QoE Perspective

MANETs are experiencing unstoppable growth due to their decentralized topology and their easy and low-cost deployment. The dynamic nature of MANETs entails the use of appropriate routing protocols to obtain good performance in the services supported by the network; even more if these services present tough temporal requirements, such as multimedia or VoIP services. One routing protocol to which notable research effort has been devoted is the BATMAN protocol, which proposes an interesting paradigm avoiding the explicit interchange of routing information among nodes. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the performance of BATMAN supporting VoIP traffic on low power-consumption nodes, from a Quality of Experience (QoE) point of view. Specifically, we evaluate the impact on BATMAN performance of 1) the PHY layer, by employing a fading characterization of the transmission channel; 2) the number and density of ad-hoc nodes; and 3) node mobility. All the results obtained for BATMAN are compared with those attained by using the widely used OLSR routing protocol. From the results, we conclude that neither BATMAN nor OLSR in their respective current implementations are suitable enough for VoIP traffic support in MANETs composed of energy-saving nodes.