Experimental Comparison of QoS-OLSR 2.0 and BATMAN within Indoor Environments

This paper presents an experimental benchmarking comparison of mesh network routing protocols. There are different routing protocols for mesh networks such as B.A.T.M.A.N, OLSR, and QoS-OLSR 2.0. Multiple works have attempted to compare existing routing protocols for mesh networks; however, they either use emulators, which do not provide realistic performance, or explore limited mobility scenarios making them incomplete when establishing the protocols’ performances. Therefore, in this paper, an experimental comparison for mesh routing protocols is conducted on Linux-based mesh communication sleeves under different mobility models. The evaluation conducted compares the performance in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio, number of reroutes, and round trip time. In this study, static straight-line topology experiments demonstrated a decrease in performance as the number of hops between the source and destination increases for the different protocols. Similarly, mobility scenarios that increase the number of hops between the source and destination result in a performance decrease. The packet delivery ratio performs optimally in stationary scenarios compared to node mobility scenarios. When comparing protocol to protocol, QoS-OLSR 2.0 seems to have a better throughput result when mobility away from the destination node is involved. On the other hand, B.A.T.M.A.N exhibits a better performance on packet delivery ratio when the same mobility is considered.