Integrating multiple radio-to-router interfaces to open source dynamic routers

Military radio systems are often constrained systems that require per link information to effectively institute QoS policies, route packets, manage topology, and tunnel application data. One of the first attempts at providing standard radio-to-router information through a common interface was point-to-point over Ethernet (PPPoE) RFC5578. Although PPPoE RFC5578 works effectively for directional radios that form point-to-point links, there are a number of limitations including added overhead, requirement of Ethernet as the medium between radio and router, and inefficient medium reuse in broadcast environments. As a result, many new protocols such as Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP) and Radio-to-Router Control Protocol (R2CP) have emerged to address the limitations of RFC5578 and provide a standard method to share per link information with the network layer. In previous work, an open source routing solution using a modified Quagga router to support dynamic link metrics were developed to support an open source implementation of radio-aware routing with RFC5578. In this paper, we present significant changes to this system to support both DLEP and R2CP on the open source router (OSR). These changes facilitate open source support of all 3 radio-to-router protocols and enable performance comparisons.