The Babel routing protocol is a distance-vector routing protocol for Internet Protocol packet-switched networks that is designed to be robust and efficient on both wireless mesh networks and wired networks. Babel is described in RFC 8966. [1]
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Babel is based on the ideas in Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector routing (DSDV), Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), and Cisco's Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), but uses different techniques for loop avoidance. Babel has provisions for using multiple dynamically computed metrics; by default, it uses hop-count on wired networks and a variant of expected transmission count on wireless links, but can be configured to take radio diversity into account [2] or to automatically compute a link's latency and include it in the metric. [3]
Babel operates on IPv4 and IPv6 networks. It has been reported to be a robust protocol and to have fast convergence properties. [4] [5]
In October 2015, Babel was chosen as the mandatory-to-implement protocol by the IETF Homenet working group, albeit on an Experimental basis. [6] In June 2016, an IETF working group was created whose main goal is to produce a standard version of Babel. [7] In January 2021, the working group produced a standard version of Babel, [1] then proceeded to publish a number of extensions, including for authentication, source-specific routing, and routing of IPv4 through IPv6 routers. [8]
