Design and implementation of WiMesh: A tool for the performance evaluation of multi-radio wireless mesh networks

In this paper we present WiMesh, a software tool we developed during the last few years of research conducted in the field of multi-radio wireless mesh networks. WiMesh serves two main purposes: (i) to evaluate and compare different algorithms for the static configuration of a wireless mesh network (assignment of channels, transmission rate and power to the available network radios, explicit routing); (ii) to automatically setup and run packet level simulations (by using the ns-3 network simulator) based on the network configuration returned by such algorithms. WiMesh consists of a core library, three libraries dedicated to distinct functionalities of WiMesh and three corresponding utilities that allow us to easily conduct experiments. To ensure ease of use and flexibility, all such utilities accept as input an XML configuration file where various options and parameters can be specified. WiMesh is freely available to the research community as open source software, with the purpose of easing the development of new algorithms and the verification of their performances. In this paper, we first present the architecture of WiMesh and its features and capabilities by illustrating the design and the usage of each of the provided utilities. Then, to the benefit of those willing to implement their own solution within WiMesh or extend its functionalities, we illustrate the design of the WiMesh libraries. Finally, we report some of the results, which we were able to show in previous research work thanks to the use of WiMesh.