Experimental Evaluation of BATMAN and BATMAN-Adv Routing Protocols in a Mobile Testbed

BATMAN (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) routing protocol is one of the popular routing protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. In this paper, we have implemented a testbed containing mobile nodes and compared two flavors of this routing protocol, BATMAN and BATMAN-Adv. These two flavors differ in the layer (ISO/OSI model) in which they are implemented, where BATMAN is implemented in layer 3 of the ISO/OSI model, and BATMAN-Adv in layer 2. Due to this differentiation, there exists significant difference in their performance and stability. In this work, we have looked at Throughput, Jitter and Packet loss of these two flavors of BATMAN routing protocol in different scenarios including single-hop and multi-hop nodes. We find that BATMAN-Adv which is implemented in layer 2 of ISO/OSI model gives significant improvement in throughput as compared to BATMAN. This is especially seen in scenarios where the nodes are mobile. However, with respect to stability in terms of jitter and packet loss, we do notice that BATMAN performs well in many scenarios compared to BATMAN-Adv, but we are not able to conclusively decide on one of them to be very significantly better than the other.