Comparing radio-to-router interface implementations on experimental CoTs and open source routers
Bow-Nan Cheng, Randy Charland, Paul Christensen, Andrea Coyle, Igor Pedan, Leonid Veytser, James Wheeler · 2012
In highly dynamic wireless environments, link metrics such as link quality, availability, and others have become increasingly important to enable smart multi-hop routing decisions. In recent years, a number of radio-to-router interface (R2RI) protocols such as Point-to-Point over Ethernet RFC5578, Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP), and Radio-Router Control Protocol (R2CP) have emerged to address the need to have a common set of link metrics exposed from the radio to the router to enhance multi-hop routing decisions. To fully evaluate R2RI functionality and specifications, differing implementations of both radio/client and router/server-side R2RI protocols must be prototyped and tested. In this paper, we present comparison tests of each of the three (3) radio-to-router interfaces with two (2) router/server-side R2RI experimental/beta R2RI implementations: one on a commercial Cisco router, and one on an open source Quagga platform. The goal of the comparison is not necessarily to provide a holistic performance comparison (as much of the code is experimental), but to highlight implementation differences and potential issues. In many cases, issues are already resolved in future releases.1