Performance evaluation of wireless mesh networks using IEEE 802.11s and IEEE 802.11n

With the recent approval of IEEE 802.11n standard and progress on IEEE 802.11s mesh standardization efforts, performance evaluation of such standards has gained acceleration. In particular, several wireless testbeds have been created to form wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in order to test various aspects of these new standards. However, none of these considered multi-hop performance of WMNs when 802.11n based nodes are employed. While IEEE 802.11s is geared for implementing multi-hopping capability among the nodes, current studies still assume IEEE 802.11a/g based nodes. This paper presents a performance evaluation of WMNs using both 802.11s (in conjunction with 802.11a/g) and 802.11n on a real academic testbed. While a draft version of 802.11s has been used for creating a linear WMN using 802.11a/g based routers, the same linear WMN using 802.11n has been created using virtualized interfaces at the IP layer. Using such WMNs, throughput performance of TCP and UDP at both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrums with different number of hops has been examined. The experiment results have shown that multi-hopping significantly degrades the expected performance of IEEE 802.11n.

[1]  Dan Keun Sung,et al.  Effect of Frame Aggregation on the Throughput Performance of IEEE 802.11n , 2008, 2008 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference.

[2]  Saad Biaz,et al.  IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks for Last-Mile Internet Access: An Open-Source Real-World Indoor Testbed Implementation , 2010, Wirel. Sens. Netw..

[3]  A.M. Otefa,et al.  Performance analysis of 802.11n wireless LAN physical layer , 2007, 2007 ITI 5th International Conference on Information and Communications Technology.

[4]  Kemal Akkaya,et al.  A taxonomy and evaluation for developing 802.11‐based wireless mesh network testbeds , 2012, Int. J. Commun. Syst..

[5]  Sung-Ju Lee,et al.  Realizing high performance multi-radio 802.11n wireless networks , 2011, 2011 8th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks.

[6]  Zhuo Chen,et al.  Performance of 802.11n WLAN with transmit antenna selection in measured indoor channels , 2008, 2008 Australian Communications Theory Workshop.

[7]  Sang-Hwa Chung,et al.  An efficient cooperation of on-demand and proactive modes in Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol , 2008, 2008 33rd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN).

[8]  Suman Banerjee,et al.  802.11n under the microscope , 2008, IMC '08.

[9]  Sixto Ortiz.  IEEE 802.11n: The Road Ahead , 2009, Computer.

[10]  F. Kamoun,et al.  Performance comparison of hop count and radio aware path selection protocols in IEEE 802.11s WLAN mesh networks , 2008, 2008 1st IFIP Wireless Days.

[11]  Jalel Ben-Othman,et al.  On improving the performance of IEEE 802.11s based wireless mesh networks using directional antenna , 2010, IEEE Local Computer Network Conference.

[12]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Wireless mesh networks: a survey , 2005, Comput. Networks.

[13]  Hsiao-Hwa Chen,et al.  IEEE 802.11n MAC frame aggregation mechanisms for next-generation high-throughput WLANs , 2008, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[14]  Kejie Lu,et al.  Performance of IEEE 802.11n in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Ad Hoc Network , 2007, MILCOM 2007 - IEEE Military Communications Conference.

[15]  Stefano Giordano,et al.  Experimental evaluation of two open source solutions for wireless mesh routing at layer two , 2010, IEEE 5th International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing 2010.

[16]  Divya Bansal,et al.  Deployment and evaluation of IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks in campus environment , 2010, NSDR '10.

[17]  Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy,et al.  Design and deployment considerations for high performance MIMO testbeds , 2008, WICON 2008.

[18]  Sofie Pollin,et al.  Performance Analysis of Double-Channel 802.11n Contending with Single-Channel 802.11 , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[19]  Qiang Ni,et al.  Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11n under different STBC rates using 64-QAM , 2007, 2007 2nd International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing.