The proliferation of mesh or ad hoc network protocols has lead to a push for protocol standardisation. While there are a number of both open-source and proprietary mesh routing protocols being developed, there is only a small amount of literature available that shows relative strengths and weaknesses of different protocols. This paper investigates the performance of a number of available routing protocols using a real-world testbed. Three routing protocols-Optimised Link State Routing (OLSR), Better Approach To Mobile Ad hoc Network (B.A.T.M.A.N.) and BABEL-were chosen for this study. Our investigations focus on the multi-hopping performance and the ability of each routing protocol to recover from link failures. Our results show that B.A.T.M.A.N. and BABEL outperform OLSR both in terms of multihopping performance and in route re-discovery latency.

This paper evaluates the performance of the IEEE 802.11 broadcast traffic under both saturation and nonsaturation conditions. The evaluation highlights some important characteristics of IEEE 802.11 broadcast traffic as compared to corresponding unicast traffic. Moreover, it underlines the inaccuracy of the broadcast saturation model proposed by Ma and Chen due to the absence of backoff counter freeze process when channel is busy. Computer simulations are used to validate the accuracy of the new model and demonstrate the importance of capturing the freezing of backoff counter in the analytical study of IEEE 802.11 broadcast.