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.European Community's Seventh Framework ProgramPublicad