A Pragmatic Evaluation of Distance Vector Proactive Routing in MANETs via Open Space Real-World Experiments

Mobile Ad hoc Networks constitute a promising and fast developing technology that could significantly enhance user freedom. The flexibility provided by such networks is accompanied by unreliability due to notably dynamic conditions that render routing quite problematic. For that reason, the research community has proposed multiple protocols claimed to address this issue, however, only few have been tested via real experiments, while even fewer have reached maturity to become readily available to end users. The main purpose of this paper is to pragmatically evaluate a promising, complete, and finalized MANET protocol via real-world experimentation in open space environment. The considered protocol, with the acronym B.A.T.M.A.N, which is based on distance vector proactive routing, was tested in different networking scenarios that revealed its ability to satisfactorily handle traffic under different conditions.