FloorNet: Deployment and Evaluation of a Multihop Wireless 802.11 Testbed Articles uri icon

publication date

  • January 2010

volume

  • 2010

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1687-1472

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1687-1499

abstract

  • A lot of attention has been given to multihop wireless networks lately, but further research—in particular, through experimentation—is needed. This attention has motivated an increase in the number of 802.11-based
    deployments, both indoor and outdoor. These testbeds, which require a
    significant amount of resources during both deployment and maintenance,
    are used to run measurements in order to analyze and understand the
    limitation and differences between analytical or simulation-based
    figures and the results from real-life experimentation. This paper makes
    two major contributions: (i) first, we describe a novel wireless
    multihop testbed, which we name FloorNet, that is deployed and operated
    under the false floor of a lab in our Computer Science building. This
    false floor provides a strong physical protection that prevents
    disconnections or misplacements, as well as radio shielding (to some
    extent) thanks to the false floor panels—this later feature is assessed
    through experimentation; (ii) second, by running exhaustive and
    controlled experiments we are able to analyze the performance limits of
    commercial off-theshelf hardware, as well as to derive practical design
    criteria for the deployment and configuration of mesh networks. These
    results both provide valuable insights of wireless multihop performance
    and prove that FloorNet constitutes a valuable asset to research on
    wireless mesh networks.