Experimental evaluation of a wireless community mesh network

Nowadays there are inexpensive WiFi devices that have fostered the deployment of wireless communities. Well known routing protocols used in the Internet do not fit well to time varying characteristic of wireless networks. This has motivated an intensive research on routing protocols for wireless mesh networks. At this time there are a number of mature and stable implementations that are being deployed in production networks. In this paper we focus on the experimental evaluation of a production Wireless Mesh network being deployed in a testbed at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and a quarter of the city of Barcelona, Spain. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper where a production community wireless network using 802.11an is analyzed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluation of mesh routing protocols for wireless community networks

In recent years, we have witnessed the exponential growth of wireless community networks as a response to the clear necessity of Internet access for participation in society. For wireless mesh networks that can scale up to thousands of nodes, which are owned and managed in a decentralized way, it is imperative for their survival to provide the network with self-management mechanisms that reduce the requirements of human intervention and technological knowledge in the operation of a community network. In this paper, we focus on one important self-management mechanism, routing, and we study the scalability, performance, and stability of three proactive mesh routing protocols: BMX6, OLSR, and Babel. We study different metrics on an emulation framework and on the W-ILab.T testbed at iMinds, making the most of the two worlds. Emulation allows us to have more control over the topology and more systematically repeat the experiments, whereas a testbed provides a realistic wireless medium and more reliable measurements, especially in terms of interference and CPU consumption. Results show the relative merits, costs, and limitations of the three protocols.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Experimental Evaluation of Wireless Mesh Networks: A Case Study and Comparison

Price of WiFi devices has decreased dramatically in recent years, while new standards, as 802.11n, have multiplied its performance. This has fostered the deployment of Wireless Mesh networks (WMN), putting into practice concepts evolved from more than a decade of research in Ad Hoc networks. Nevertheless, evolution of WMN it is in its infancy, as shows the growing and diverse number of scenarios where WMN are being deployed. In these paper we analyze a particular case study of a Wireless Community Mesh Network, and we compare it with a selected experimental WMN studies found in the literature

Experimentation with MANETs of Smartphones

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively survey existing possibilities to build applications on top of ad-hoc smartphone networks for experimentation purposes, and introduce a taxonomy to classify them. We present AdHocDroid, an Android package that creates an IP-level MANET of (rooted) Android smartphones, and make it publicly available to the community. AdHocDroid supports standard TCP/IP applications, providing real smartphone IEEE 802.11 MANET and the capability to easily change the routing protocol. We tested our framework on several smartphones and a laptop. We validate the MANET running off-the-shelf applications, and reporting on experimental performance evaluation, including network metrics and battery discharge rate.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

A GA-based simulation system for WMNs: comparison analysis for different number of flows, client distributions, DCF and EDCA functions

In this paper, we compare the performance of Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) for normal and uniform distributions of mesh clients considering two Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) architectures. As evaluation metrics, we consider throughput, delay, jitter and fairness index metrics. For simulations, we used WMN-GA simulation system, ns-3 and Optimized Link State Routing. The simulation results show that for normal distribution, the throughput of I/B WMN is higher than Hybrid WMN architecture. For uniform distribution, in case of I/B WMN, the throughput of EDCA is a little bit higher than Hybrid WMN. However, for Hybrid WMN, the throughput of DCF is higher than EDCA. For normal distribution, the delay and jitter of Hybrid WMN are lower compared with I/B WMN. For uniform distribution, the delay and jitter of both architectures are almost the same. However, in the case of DCF for 20 flows, the delay and jitter of I/B WMN are lower compared with Hybrid WMN. For I/B architecture, in case of normal distribution the fairness index of DCF is higher than EDCA. However, for Hybrid WMN, the fairness index of EDCA is higher than DCF. For uniform distribution, the fairness index of few flows is higher than others for both WMN architectures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio