Shipboard experiments for a multihop 802.11 communications system-RF channel characterization and MAC performance measurement

Wireless relays offer one approach to providing communications among small teams operating below-decks on neutral or hostile ships. Two sets of experiments were conducted aboard a container ship to determine the viability of this approach. In the first set of experiments, RF propagation loss and coherence bandwidth were assessed in both the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz ISM bands. In the second set, packet latency and throughput were assessed for 802.11a and 802.11b networks operating in multihop configurations with hidden nodes. On the basis of these experiments, it is concluded that the wireless relay concept is workable in the shipboard environment using 802.11 wireless networks. The 802.11 variants offer different trades among data rate, relay separation, and supporting hardware requirements