Performance study of the Better Approach to Mobile Adhoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N.) protocol in the context of asymmetric links

The performance of a mesh network is mainly affected by the utilized routing protocol and its capability to detect topology changes and to select stable and reliable routes. In real-world scenarios, a high fraction of links have asymmetric characteristics which has to be concerned by routing protocols in order to find optimized routes. The latest version of the Better Approach to Mobile Adhoc Networking protocol (B.A.T.M.A.N.) introduces its own routing metric, addressing the problem of integrating asymmetric links efficiently in the network topology. In this work, we compare version III and IV of the B.A.T.M.A.N protocol in terms of delivery ratio, average end-to-end hop count and generated overhead in two scenarios with a high fraction of asymmetric links to assess the quality of the newly introduced mechanisms on the performance of the protocol.