On topology creation for an indoor wireless grid

Abstract

Most space constrained indoor wireless testbeds have majority of the nodes under a single collision domain. Emulation of multi-hop topologies on such testbeds is usually achieved either through the use of additional hardware like external noise injection or software techniques such as MAC frame filtering. We show that while these two techniques are able to create simple scenarios, creating large-scale, realistic topologies remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose and implement a Bursty PER filtering mechanism, which can filter packets on a link according to preset PER in the software domain. We first show that this new method can provide a better support for fine-grained link PER and localized link control. Further, we show that it is possible to create large scale topologies (of the order of 100nodes). We substantiate our claims by empirical evaluation on the ORBIT indoor wireless testbed.