Testbed for Multi-Hop Ad hoc Network in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Environment

Simulation always plays an important role in wireless multi-hop ad hoc network researches, but real world testing is much more critical for the possible future ad hoc applications. Hence, as the foundation of real word testing, testbed implementation is obviously significant. This paper presents the challenges encountered by implementing such a real world multi-hop Ad hoc network testbed, which is founded on the Windows system with IEEE 802.11 protocol. After some implementation strategies analysis, this paper puts forward an implementation proposal based on the Windows system´s Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS). And this paper also presents a concrete implementation, adopting the classical ad hoc routing protocol, Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol, which is finally working as a Windows network driver in kernel mode. Technical details of the testbed implementation are discussed and performance evaluation results from indoor experiments are demonstrated.