MobiMESH: An Experimental Platform for Wireless MESH Networks with Mobility Support
Antonio Capone, Stefano Napoli, Alberto Pollastro · 2006
Abstract — Wireless Mesh Networks represent nowadays ’ new frontier of wireless networking technology. In fact, WMNs allow the extension of traditional wireless access networks through multihop relaying; this leads to the creation of easily deployable, flexible and reliable networks. WMNs have been largely studied through theoretical models and simulations, but the first experimental testbed studies have shown that simulation results are not always accurate because simulation cannot account for some aspects of a mesh network that are indeed crucial to performance evaluation. Deploying an experimental testbed represents an interesting challenge, because of many problems that have to be solved both on the architectural design side and on the practical implementation side. In this paper we present MobiMESH, a WMN architecture that has been implemented in a real life testbed. The architecture is designed with high mobility support and with integration capabilities. Mobility management is supported with a set of procedures that constitute an intermediate stratum between layer 2 and layer 3. Experimental results and performances are shown, and problems and future works are outlined. I.