Abstract-The B.A.T.M.A.

N routing algorithm is a
routing solution for ad hoc wireless networks. Two of
these branches, Batmand and Batman-adv are the most
commonly used as the default routing protocols on the
Mesh Potatoes (MP). The MPs are devices that use VoIP
to communicate over the air with each other. These
devices are the most common use of the Batman routing
protocols and there are no performance tests conducted
on the devices. Furthermore, there are no performance
tests that can conclusively tell us which of the two
branches is the better one and should serve as the first
choice on the MPs. This paper highlights the differences
between the protocols theoretically and describes a
testbed in order to measure performances of the routing
protocols.

Index TermsB.A.T.M.A.N, ad hoc wireless
networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
The B.A.T.M.A.N routing algorithm is a routing solution
for ad hoc wireless networks. This algorithm gave rise to
three recognized branches that stem from the original
description of the algorithm described in [1]. These branches
are Batmand (batman daemon), BatMan-eXperimental
(BMX) and Batman-advanced (Batman-adv) [2]. We
investigate Batman-adv, the most recent branch, and
Batmand because these are the most commonly used.
Furthermore, we have not found evidence of any
performance testing that explicitly tests and compares the
two protocols. We aim to fill this void by comparing the
performance of these two Batman protocols. These tests
would give us valuable insight into the real-world
performance of these two protocols and their relative
performance.

The Batman protocol is the protocol of choice for the
wireless communication device called Mesh Potato (MP)
[3]. The MPs use Voice over IP (VoIP) over a wireless
medium to communicate with connected nodes on the ad
hoc wireless network. This device can benefit communities,
institutions and businesses wishing to connect everyone in
the group. Therefore performance tests done to test the
Batman protocols should be done on these devices.

Some performance testing between the two protocols have
been done [4] however the results from the experiments
were inconclusive. Furthermore the bulk of the
performance testing only focuses on the Batmand protocol
and almost nothing on Batman-adv [5] [6] [7] . Out of
those experiments performed none were conducted on the
MP devices.

In the next sections we present a practical insight into a
real-world performance comparison of the Batmand and
the Batman-adv wireless routing protocols. We also
describe a testbed used in order to measure performances
of the routing protocols and highlight the differences
between the protocols theoretically.
II. RELATED WORK
The Batmand and the Batman-adv implementation
branches differ in the way in which the protocol was
implemented. Batmand was implemented as a layer three
(OSI stack) while Batman-adv as a layer two protocol.
However, both are both based on the Batman III algorithm
described next.
A. B.A.T.M.A.N
Batman [8], does not maintain the full route to the
destination, each node along the route only maintains the
information about the next link through which the node
can find the best route [9]. The objective is to maximize
the probability of delivering a message. Batman does not
attempt to check the quality of each the link, it just checks
its existence and chooses a link based on the number of
messages received on that link. The protocol does these
checks by having every node periodically broadcast hello
packets to all its neighbours. These packets are known as
originator messages (OGM) and each have a unique
sequence number.

The links are compared in terms of the number of
originator messages that have been received within the
current sliding window on a specific link; this value is
called the transmission quality (TQ) value and is the
routing metric used by Batman. TQ is just a name given to
metric; it does not imply actual link quality checks. The
sliding window is a fixed value that defines a range of the
unique sequence numbers afforded to each OGM packet
sent by a node.
B. Batmand versus Batman-adv
The main difference between the two protocols:
Batman-adv works at layer two of the OSI protocol
stack.
Batmand works at layer three of the OSI protocol
stack.
Batman-adv needs only the Mac address to work
Performance Comparison of B.A.T.M.A.Nd and
B.A.T.M.A.N-adv
Edmundo Chissungo, Edwin Blake and Hanh Le
Department of Computer Science
University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Cape Town, 7701
Tel: +27 21 650 2663, Fax: +27 21 650 3551
email: {edmundo.chissungo, edwin, hanh}@uct.ac.za

Batmand needs IP to work.
Batman-adv emulates an Ethernet bridge, so that all
nodes appear to be connected by a direct link and all
protocols above layer two are not aware of multi hops.
Batmand all protocols are aware of the multi-hop
nature of the underlying network.
Batmans routing technique incurs low processing and
traffic cost [8]. This makes it an attractive option for use on
devices that have limited processing power such as the MP.
C. Mesh Potato
The village Telco group [10] describe the MP as a wireless
System on Chip (SoC) the processor and all wireless
functionality is combined in a single chip. MP uses the ad
hoc profile which is a mode that wireless cards can operate
in. The ad hoc profile allows any wireless node to connect
to any other node within range which forms the wireless
blanket or cloud and with the use of batman as a routing
protocol it creates a communication network. The MP was
primarily developed for Voice over IP (VoIP) using plain
old telephones (POTs). The MP can also be used for data
networks.
III. EXPERIMENTAL SET UP
Our approach is to set up a testbed and have the actual
MPs be the nodes in the testbed. In order to generate and
collect data we shall have two Unix machines. These
machines will be passive nodes, meaning that they will not
perform any routing, so as not to influence the results. We
have planned to use the entire third floor of the Computer
Science Department at the University of Cape Town.

Currently we have 14 MPs and the challenge will be to see
how many of these we can have in our testbed. The
limitations of this are the size of the space available and the
range of each wireless card in the MPs. We shall force as
many hops as possible to occur in the network and add this
as a variable in our experiments.

We use packets of size 73 bytes and 1500 bytes, each
representing voice packet or standard Ethernet packets
respectively and here understood as the load. In doing this
we hop to compare the performance of the network when
dealing with voice and data packets sizes. We shall also
collect data and observe the following metrics: Bandwidth
(B), Throughput (Tp), Jitter (J), Packet Loss Ratio (PLR)
and Delay (D).
A. Scenarios
The experiments will be broken down into scenarios as
shown in figures 1 and 2. Each scenario will be represented
by the number of hops travelled by the data from source to
destination. Each of the hops scenarios shall be composed of
the two Unix machines, one generating and one receiving
the traffic, and also at least one MP routing the data.

In each of the scenarios we shall conduct the same
experiments. In these experiments we shall vary the load.
Each load will have an iteration of 60 times in which 1000
packets are sent.


Figure 1 shows the one hop scenario with two Unix
machines only


Figure 2 shows the two hops scenarios with MPs

IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this work we plan to investigate the real-world
performance comparison of the Batmand and the Batman-
adv wireless routing protocols. We shall conduct this
investigation through experiments conducted on a MP
indoor testbed. The use of the MP devices will give us an
in-sight into the performance of the protocols on devices
that have limited processing power.

Edmundo Chissungo received his
undergraduate degree in 2008 from
the University of Cape Town and is
presently studying towards his Master
of Computer Science degree at the
same institution. His research interests
include Batman routing protocol,
wireless mesh networks and ICT4D.

V. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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to mobile ad-hoc networking (batman)," IETF Work In Progress
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