When AREDN forked off the Broadband Hamnet software in  2015, they inherited OLSR V1 as the routing protocol.    It had been deprecated years before because of known shortcomings, but AREDN had to live with it.  Over the years several band-aids were applied to the OLSR protocol and it became mostly usable.

The hunt for a replacement routing protocol started in earnest several years ago and Babel was selected.  It's much 'smarter' about network topology and conditions than OLSR and uses less bandwidth to maintain a node's knowledge of the surrounding network.

That being said, like with OLSR, we hams are using Babel in a manner the developers probably didn't anticipate and as a result you AREDN users have uncovered some issues that have been addressed (and continue to be addressed) via nightly builds.

The bottom line:  your network will work better with a current nightly build in your nodes.   Give it some serious consideration.

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Orv W6BI

AREDN Project Manager