Implementation of a Multi-radio, Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Network Using Dynamic WDS Based Link Layer Routing

In this paper, we introduce a Linux-based implementation of a WLAN mesh system which can be used to construct multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks. We found that most wireless mesh system implementations from the research community are built by combining some existing Linux networking packages. While this approach enables fast and easy development, it shows weak points in supporting or reflecting link layer characteristics. For example, many implementations do not support dynamic link set-up between nodes and do not take advantage of multi-channel feature of WLAN. As a result, most existing implementations suffer from inflexibility in network configuration and low network performance in multi-hop paths. The main design goal of our system is to fully exploit link layer characteristics to enhance configuration flexibility and network performance. To achieve this, we develop our own networking components by modifying existing Linux modules or adding new ones. The contributions of this paper are implementation platform for a WLAM mesh networks which enables dynamic link set-up using Dynamic WDS and multi-channel paths selection. According to our experimental results, our system supports fast autonomous network configuration and shows high network performance by making use of multi-channel paths.