MobiMESH: An Experimental Platform for Wireless MESH Networks with Mobility Support

Abstract—Wireless Mesh Networks represent nowadays’ newfrontier of wireless networking technology. In fact, WMNs allowthe extension of traditional wireless access networks throughmultihop relaying; this leads to the creation of easily deployable,flexible and reliable networks. WMNs have been largely studiedthrough theoretical models and simulations, but the first exper-imental testbed studies have shown that simulation results arenot always accurate because simulation cannot account for someaspects of a mesh network that are indeed crucial to performanceevaluation. Deploying an experimental testbed represents aninteresting challenge, because of many problems that have to besolved both on the architectural design side and on the practicalimplementation side. In this paper we present MobiMESH, aWMN architecture that has been implemented in a real lifetestbed. The architecture is designed with high mobility supportand with integration capabilities. Mobility management is sup-ported with a set of procedures that constitute an intermediatestratum between layer 2 and layer 3. Experimental results andperformances are shown, and problems and future works areoutlined.