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 (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 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.

Four implementations of Babel are freely available: the standalone "reference" implementation, a version that used to be integrated into the Quagga routing suite, a minimal reimplemantation in Python and one that is an extension to the BIRD routing platform. The version that was integrated into Quagga allowed for authentication, while the reference version has support for Source-specific routing.

In October 2015, Babel was chosen as the mandatory-to-implement protocol by the IETF Homenet working group, albeit on an Experimental basis.