On benchmarking routing protocols

While many other disciplines have developed defacto standards to benchmark solutions to their pressing problems, routing protocols are often evaluated in an ad-hoc manner. The resulting variations in the evaluation lead to diminished comparability between different proposals. In this paper, we present a simulation framework for reproducible benchmarking of routing algorithms under various metrics, e.g., stretch, convergence time, routing table size, and message overhead. The measurements are performed on a variety of network topologies and with variations in network dynamics in order to capture the behavior and the capabilities of a routing protocol. Our framework is based on the well-known discrete event simulator OMNeT++ and provides an easy-to-use modular interface, statistic collection for the important metrics as well as a set of network topologies including precalculated metrics. This set of network topologies may serve as an additional reference point in the evaluation of routing protocols complementing existing reference topologies. We provide this framework to the research community as open-source software to alleviate rapid development, testing, and comparison of new routing protocols.