Babel (protocol)

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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]

Contents

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]

Implementations

babeld
Developer(s) Juliusz Chroboczek
Repository
Operating system Linux, BSD, Mac OS X
Type Routing software
License MIT License
Website www.irif.fr/~jch/software/babel/   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Several implementations of Babel are freely available:

Both BIRD and the reference version have support for Source-specific routing [16] and for cryptographic authentication. [17]

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References

  1. 1 2 Chroboczek, Juliusz; Schinazi, David (January 2021). The Babel Routing Protocol. doi: 10.17487/RFC8966 . RFC 8966.
  2. ↑ Chroboczek <jch@pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr>, Juliusz (15 February 2016). "Diversity Routing for the Babel Routing Protocol". Ietf Datatracker.
  3. ↑ Jonglez, Baptiste; Boutier, Matthieu; Chroboczek, Juliusz (2014). "A delay-based routing metric". arXiv: 1403.3488 [cs.NI].
  4. ↑ M. Abolhasan; B. Hagelstein; J. C.-P. Wang (2009). "Real-world performance of current proactive multi-hop mesh protocols". 2009 15th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications. pp. 44–47. doi:10.1109/APCC.2009.5375690. ISBN   978-1-4244-4784-8. S2CID   15462784.
  5. ↑ David Murray, Michael Dixon & Terry Koziniec (2010). An Experimental Comparison of Routing Protocols in Multi Hop Ad Hoc Networks (PDF). Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference. doi:10.1109/ATNAC.2010.5680190.
  6. ↑ http://mid.gmane.org/562F5B00.9010802@bellis.me.uk%5B%5D
  7. ↑ "Babel routing protocol". datatracker.ietf.org.
  8. ↑ "Babel routing protocol (Babel)".
  9. ↑ "proto/babel · master · labs / BIRD Internet Routing Daemon". GitLab.
  10. ↑ "Merge pull request #624 "Babel" · FRRouting/frr@e885ed8". GitHub.
  11. ↑ "babeld: Remove babeld from Quagga · 6WIND/quagga@336724d". GitHub. Retrieved 2017-10-24.
  12. ↑ "sbabeld". GitHub .
  13. ↑ "Archive". mailarchive.ietf.org.
  14. ↑ "dirlist". sources.nop.hu.
  15. ↑ "freeRouter - networking swiss army knife". freerouter.nop.hu.
  16. ↑ Matthieu Boutier; Juliusz Chroboczek (2015). Source-Specific Routing. Proc. IFIP Networking. arXiv: 1403.0445 . Bibcode:2014arXiv1403.0445B.
  17. ↑ Do, Clara; Chroboczek, Juliusz; Kolodziejak, Weronika. "MAC authentication for the Babel routing protocol". Ietf Datatracker.
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