Experimental evaluation of a wireless community mesh network

Abstract

Nowadays there are inexpensive WiFi devices that have fostered the deployment of wireless communities. Well known routing protocols used in the Internet do not fit well to time varying characteristic of wireless networks. This has motivated an intensive research on routing protocols for wireless mesh networks. At this time there are a number of mature and stable implementations that are being deployed in production networks. In this paper we focus on the experimental evaluation of a production Wireless Mesh network being deployed in a testbed at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and a quarter of the city of Barcelona, Spain. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper where a production community wireless network using 802.11an is analyzed.