Experiences from building an Outdoor Testbed for Community Wireless Networks

Abstract-Community Wireless Networks are an emerging networking model, offering people the opportunity to build and manage their own network without being dependent on telecom operators. The strength of this type of networks lies in the involvement of the whole community, as each person benefitting from the community wireless network somehow contributes to the design, deployment and maintenance of the network. This model has resulted in large community wireless networks growing all over the world, connecting people in the local communities to each other and the Internet. Because of the rising popularity and demonstrated success, researchers are also becoming more interested in community networks. This paper presents guidelines and experiences from creating an outdoor testbed targeted at community wireless networks, based on experience and feedback from community network members

A testbed for MANETs: Implementation, experiences and learned lessons

In this paper, we present the implementation, experiences and lessons learned of our tesbed for Ad-hoc networks and Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). We used OLSR protocol for real experimental evaluation. We investigate the effect of mobility and topology changing in the throughput of a MANET. We study the impact of best-effort traffic for Mesh Topology and Linear Topology. In this work, we consider eight experimental models and we assess the performance of our testbed in terms of throughput, round trip time and packet loss. We found that some of the OLSR's problems can be solved, for instance the routing loop, but this protocol still has the self-interference problem. Also, there is an intricate interdependence between MAC layer and routing layer. We carried out the experiments considering stationary nodes of an Ad-hoc network and the node mobility of MANETs. We found that throughput of TCP was improved by reducing Link Quality Window Size (LQWS). For TCP data flow, we got better results when the LQWS value was 10. Moreover, we found that the node join and leave operations increase the packet loss. The OLSR protocol has a good performance when the source node is moving. However, the performance is not good when the relay nodes are moving.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

AMazING - Advanced Mobile wireless playGrouND

We describe a wireless testbed composed of 24 wireless nodes that can be used to perform a broad range of studies in the area of next generation networks. This paper addresses the difficulties and constrains faced by the authors throughout the deployment process of such testbed. Flexibility and controllability were key concerns driving the testbed design. The testbed can be remotely managed through a series of remotely accessible web services performing low level management. Validation results are presented, showing the interference levels of the testbed as well as its maximum throughput capabilities

Lessons learned from the deployment of a multihop IEEE 802.11g testbed using COTS devices

Proceedings of: 2010 European Wireless Conference (EW2010), (April 12-15, 2010), Lucca, ItalyA lot of attention has been given to multihop wireless networks lately, but further research is needed. This attention has motivated an increase in the number of 802.11- based deployments, both indoor and outdoor. These testbeds are used to run measurements in order to analyze and understand the limitation and differences between analytical or simulationbased figures and the results from real-life experimentation. In this paper we describe the lessons learned from the deployment of a wireless multihop testbed under the false floor of a laboratory in our Computer Science building. We assess the radio shielding provided by the false floor panels, and run exhaustive and controlled experiments to analyze the performance limits of commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The results obtained confirm that experimental measurements can severely deviate from the expected theoretical values.European Community's Seventh Framework ProgramPartly funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, under the QUARTET project (TIN2009-13992-C02-01)Publicad

Reliable routing scheme for indoor sensor networks

Indoor Wireless sensor networks require a highly dynamic, adaptive routing scheme to deal with the high rate of topology changes due to fading of indoor wireless channels. Besides that, energy consumption rate needs to be consistently distributed among sensor nodes and efficient utilization of battery power is essential. If only the link reliability metric is considered in the routing scheme, it may create long hops routes, and the high quality paths will be frequently used. This leads to shorter lifetime of such paths; thereby the entire network's lifetime will be significantly minimized. This paper briefly presents a reliable load-balanced routing (RLBR) scheme for indoor ad hoc wireless sensor networks, which integrates routing information from different layers. The proposed scheme aims to redistribute the relaying workload and the energy usage among relay sensor nodes to achieve balanced energy dissipation; thereby maximizing the functional network lifetime. RLBR scheme was tested and benchmarked against the TinyOS-2.x implementation of MintRoute on an indoor testbed comprising 20 Mica2 motes and low power listening (LPL) link layer provided by CC1000 radio. RLBR scheme consumes less energy for communications while reducing topology repair latency and achieves better connectivity and communication reliability in terms of end-to-end packets delivery performance

An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity

Concept and design of the hybrid distributed embedded systems testbed

Wireless mesh networks are an emerging and versatile communication technology. The most common application of these networks is to provide access of any number of users to the world wide Internet. They can be set up by Internet service providers or even individuals joined in communities. Due to the wireless medium that is shared by all participants, effects like short-time fading, or the multi-hop property of the network topology many issues are still in the focus of research. Testbeds are a powerful tool to study wireless mesh networks as close as possible to real world application scenarios. In this technical report we describe the design, architecture, and implementation of our work-in-progress wireless testbed at Freie Universität Berlin consisting of 100 mesh routers that span multiple buildings. The testbed is hybrid as it combines wireless mesh network routers with a wireless sensor network