A scalable dual-radio wireless testbed for emulating mesh networks

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and evaluate ScaleMesh, a scalable miniaturized dual-radio wireless mesh testbed based on IEEE 802.11b/g technology. ScaleMesh can emulate large-scale mesh networks within a miniaturized experimentation area by adaptively shrinking the transmission range of mesh nodes by means of variable signal attenuators. To this end, we derive a theoretical formula for approximating the attenuation level required for downscaling desired network topologies. We conduct a comprehensive performance study, in which we validate the feasibility of ScaleMesh for network emulation and protocol evaluation. Among others, we study the effect of channel selection, signal attenuation level, different topologies, and traffic load on network performance. We particularly focus on the performance of single-radio versus dual-radio communication, while investigating key parameters which can provide a substantial improvement in performance. We show that dual-radio communication improves network goodput by up to 100%, yet does not overcome TCP's fairness problems over IEEE 802.11.

A simple scheme to improve the throughput of small multi-hop wireless networks

“…There is no centralized infrastructure controlling these multi-hop networks and their inherent "self-healing" ability improves the overall reliability of the system [1]. While the majority of the research in this field focusses on either simulation studies (using, for example, ns-2 [2] or OPNET [3]) or theoretical analyses, in order to provide a better understanding of mesh networks, there has been a small but growing trend to implement wireless mesh testbeds [1,[4][5][6][7].…”