on the development of a ieee 802.11s mesh point prototype
Wireless Mesh Networks are a new, flexible and cost effective access technology that is gaining wide popularity replacing the traditional sets of wired IEEE 802.11 Access Points. Vendors and network operators have developed and deployed their own proprietary solutions, which are not compatible. The IEEE set off Task Group 802.11s to harmonize these equipments around a common standard. The draft however is far from its final version, and, though the major features are defined, work is still in progress. To support the test and evaluation of the features of this upcoming standard, we have built a prototype 802.11s Mesh Access Point. Starting from common off-the-shelf technology, we developed a modular software framework that can easily and quickly embed new features. In its current state, the prototype allowed us to experimentally evaluate the basic 802.11s characteristics, pointing out some shortcomings, such as the path instability due to the airtime metric, and suggesting possible improvements.
ieee 802.11s prototype wireless mesh networks experimental testbed