Integrating radio-to-router protocols into EMANE

In highly dynamic wireless environments, link metrics such as link quality, availability, and others have become increasingly important to enable smart multi-hop routing decisions. In recent years, a number of radio-to-router interface (R2RI) protocols such as Point-to-Point over Ethernet RFC5578, Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP), and Radio-Router Control Protocol (R2CP) have emerged to address the need to have a common set of link metrics exposed from the radio to the router to enhance multi-hop routing decisions. In the past, testing R2RI required separate processes and proxies to convert layer 2 link metrics into R2RI standard formats. Although useful for allowing legacy radio systems to comply with R2RI formats, the proxy technique is difficult for building large-scale (100+ node) test environments with emulated radios and routers. In this paper, we describe modifications made to a popular open source link emulator, EMANE, to support emerging radio-to-router interface (R2RI) standards, DLEP and R2CP, on several EMANE MAC models including 802.11 and CommEffect. Additionally, a functional evaluation of the system is performed¹.