Babel (protocol)


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 based on the ideas in Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector routing, Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing, and Cisco's Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol, 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 ETX on wireless links, but can be configured to take radio diversity into account or to automatically compute a link's latency and include it in the metric.
Babel operates on IPv4 and IPv6 networks. It has been reported to be a robust protocol and to have fast convergence properties.
In October 2015, Babel was chosen as the mandatory-to-implement protocol by the IETF Homenet working group, albeit on an Experimental basis. In June 2016, an IETF working group was created whose main goal is to produce a standard version of Babel.

Implementations

Several implementations of Babel are freely available:
Both BIRD and the reference version have support for Source-specific routing.. Both BIRD and the reference version have support for an extension to do authentication, but it has not been merged yet into the mainline version.