WiPi: A Low-Cost Heterogeneous Wireless Testbed for Next Generation Applications

The high cost of setting up a wireless testbed prevents many institutes from equipping a lab with the required devices, especially in the developing countries. Remotely accessible testbeds provide a solution to this problem by allowing researchers to access the wireless testbeds through the Internet. In this work, we present the design, architecture and evaluation of WiPi: a low-cost remotely-accessible testbed that is built from heterogeneous devices and supports next-generation applications. WiPi efficiently utilizes available off-the-shelf computing nodes, such as standard laptops and Raspberry Pis, to increase the testbed resource utilization. Multiple features including users' isolation, resource pooling, ease of user experience, power efficiency, multiple application domains, efficient disk utilization, and disk protection are implemented as part of the testbed. Evaluation of WiPi using Software Defined Radios as the network interface over a mixed network of laptops and Raspberry Pis show that WiPi can support a different range of wireless networking applications, highlighting its suitability as a low-cost heterogeneous remotely accessible testbed.