ROUTE-O-MATIC: A comprehensive framework for reactive mesh routing protocols

This paper outlines the implementation design and performance evaluation of ROUTE-O-MATIC, a comprehensive framework for reactive mesh routing on Linux. This framework provides a set of necessary but not natively supported services and interfaces for the development of mesh routing protocols on Linux. In wireless mesh networks, especially in mobile scenarios, reactive ad-hoc routing protocols are used to discover routes on demand between mesh nodes. Those protocols depend on special features for which the current network subsystem of Linux is not designed. These include among others an interface to notify about a required route discovery to a certain host, and a buffer to temporarily store all data while the route discovery is performed. The ROUTE-O-MATIC framework adds these features to the Linux kernel. Additionally, the framework offers a Link Layer Feedback support, which reports every transmission failure in order to accelerate the detection of broken links. The framework´s performance is investigated on an x86 and ARM based embedded hardware. The results show that the time overhead of ROUTE-O-MATIC is significantly low.