Evaluation of a MANET Testbed for Central Bridge and V-Shape Bridge Scenarios Using BATMAN Routing Protocol

A set of wireless mobile terminals, which cooperate by forwarding packets to each other defines a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). MANETs are attractive for their potential use in several fields such as collaborative computing and smart environments. Considering the limited bandwidth capabilities of the wireless links, communication of MANET nodes needs to be investigated. In this paper, we analyze the performance of our MANET testbed in an outdoor bridge environment considering multihop and vertical communication in mesh and linear topology. We implement two scenarios to evaluate the communication in terms of throughput and jitter. The nodes on the testbed use Better Approach to MANET (BATMAN) routing protocol. From experimental results, throughput decreases when the number of hops increases and it has the best performance in Central Bridge (CB) scenario and mesh topology. While jitter improves for less number of hops and linear topology, which avoids the interference of other nodes.