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Physical Layer Measurements for an 802.11 Wireless Mesh Network Testbed

Authors:
Stanley W. K. Ng
Ted H. Szymanski

Keywords: wireless mesh network; 802.11; co-channel interference; noise; SINR;

Abstract:
Physical layer measurements for an infrastructure 802.11 Multichannel MultiBand Wireless Mesh Network testbed are described. Each wireless router node design consists of a Linux processor with multiple 802.11b/g transceivers operating in the 5 GHz band for backhauling, and multiple 802.11 transceivers in the 2.4 GHz band for end-user service. Each transceiver consists of a MAC and base-band processor (BBP) in addition to a radio. A Linux-based device driver has been modified to adjust the physical layer parameters. The 802.11 standard specifies three orthogonal channels, 1, 6, and 11. The routers can be programmed to implement any static mesh binary tree topology by assigning orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) channels to network edges. The routers can be programmed to implement any general mesh communication topology by using a time division multiple access (TDMA) frame schedule, and assigning OFDM channels to network edges within each TDMA frame. Preliminary measurements of co-channel interference and the signal to interference and noise (SINR) ratio for the network testbed are presented, using omni-directional antenna and the 802.11b operation mode. This data can be used to optimize the performance of large infrastructure Wireless Mesh networks using 802.11 technology.

Pages: 199 to 204

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: February 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3956

ISBN: 978-1-61208-116-8

Location: Gosier, Guadeloupe, France

Dates: from February 23, 2011 to February 28, 2011