Babel (protocol) explained

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]

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

Qid:	Q112255918
babeld
Developer:	Juliusz Chroboczek
Operating System:	Linux, BSD, Mac OS X
Genre:	Routing software
License:	MIT License

Several implementations of Babel are freely available:

• The standalone "reference" implementation
• A complete reimplementation integrated in the BIRD routing platform^[9]
• A version integrated into the FRR routing suite^[10] (previously Quagga, from which Babel has been removed^[11]).
• A tiny, stub-only subset implementation^[12]
• A minimal, IPv6-only reimplementation in Python^[13]
• An independent implementation in Java,^[14] part of the freeRouter project^[15]

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

External links

• Babel – a loop-avoiding distance-vector routing protocol

Notes and References

1. 8966 . The Babel Routing Protocol. January 2021. Chroboczek. Juliusz. Schinazi. David.
2. Diversity Routing for the Babel Routing Protocol. Juliusz. Chroboczek . Ietf Datatracker. 15 February 2016.
3. 1403.3488 . Jonglez . Baptiste . Boutier . Matthieu . Chroboczek . Juliusz . A delay-based routing metric . 2014 . cs.NI .
4. Book: M. Abolhasan . B. Hagelstein . J. C.-P. Wang . 2009 15th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications . Real-world performance of current proactive multi-hop mesh protocols. 2009. 44–47 . 10.1109/APCC.2009.5375690 . 978-1-4244-4784-8 . 15462784 . http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/736/.
5. Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference . David Murray, Michael Dixon . Terry Koziniec . amp . An Experimental Comparison of Routing Protocols in Multi Hop Ad Hoc Networks . 2010 . 10.1109/ATNAC.2010.5680190 .
6. http://mid.gmane.org/[e-mail]{{Dead link|date=October 2019 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}
7. Web site: Babel routing protocol. datatracker.ietf.org.
8. Web site: Babel routing protocol (Babel) .
9. Web site: proto/babel · master · labs / BIRD Internet Routing Daemon. GitLab.
10. Web site: Merge pull request #624 "Babel" · FRRouting/frr@e885ed8. GitHub.
11. Web site: babeld: Remove babeld from Quagga · 6WIND/quagga@336724d. GitHub. en. 2017-10-24.
12. Web site: sbabeld. .
13. Web site: Archive. mailarchive.ietf.org.
14. Web site: dirlist. sources.nop.hu.
15. Web site: freeRouter - networking swiss army knife. freerouter.nop.hu.
16. Matthieu Boutier. Juliusz Chroboczek. Source-Specific Routing. Proc. IFIP Networking. 2015. 1403.0445. 2014arXiv1403.0445B.
17. MAC authentication for the Babel routing protocol. Clara. Do. Juliusz. Chroboczek. Weronika. Kolodziejak. Ietf Datatracker.