Experimental performance assessment of WMN routing protocols with mobile nodes

Increasing the performance of wireless mesh networks is an important topic, which has been addressed in both theory and practice. Indeed, the availability of low-cost hardware justifies hands-on investigations and comparisons of protocols used in mesh networks deployments. In this work, we describe a real-life testbed that we have developed in order to investigate traffic routing in multihop, multiradio meshed networks with mobile users. We consider an environment where a user connects to different infrastructure mesh nodes as it moves, and we compare the performance of state-of-the-art routing protocols, namely, OLSR, OLSR-ETX, B.A.T.M.A.N and our modified version of this protocol, called sw-B.A.T.M.A.N. Our experimental measurements show that sw-B.A.T.M.A.N outperforms the other protocols, ensuring a seamless connectivity in presence of MPEG video streaming, with and without background traffic.