An evaluation of BMX6 for community wireless networks

Nowadays, a growing number of communities of citizens build, operate and own open IP-based community wireless networks with thousands of low capacity nodes actively participating in routing the data traffic. This article focuses on one of their concerns, routing and its scalability, by presenting BatMan-eXperimental Version 6 (BMX6) and evaluating its performance. BMX6 is a low overhead and scalable mesh network routing protocol inspired by human networks. Its performance is evaluated in comparison with OLSR in terms of overhead and convergence time as networks grow in number of nodes and diameter. The results show that the convergence time and protocol overhead per node in BMX6 is not significantly affected by the addition of new nodes in contrast with OLSR, where both parameters can grow super-linearly. This confirms the excellent scalability of BMX6.