IEEE 802.11s performance assessment: From simulations to real-world experiments
Alessandra Flammini, Emiliano Sisinni, Federico Tramarin · 2017
In this work we aim at providing an initial analysis of the IEEE802.11s amendment that introduced support for mesh networking to Wireless LAN specifications. Indeed, there has been an increasing interest in the adoption of IEEE 802.11-based wireless systems also in the field of Distributed Measurement Systems (DMSs). Nonetheless, in such a scenario it is necessary to investigate the obtainable performance, in terms of latency, reliability and throughput. Toward this goal, we firstly considered the public available ns-3 IEEE 802.11s model, highlighting some details of the implemented design and also showing some of the unsupported features and open issues. Subsequently, we also leveraged on the mac80211 network emulation features embedded within the Linux kernel to test the mesh extensions included in Linux systems. Finally, using low-cost COTS hardware, exploiting the same mesh stack, we developed a real-world test bench allowing an experimental performance assessment. Results obtained from the presented setups are thus compared, and some open issues are finally discussed.