A wireless mesh network (WMN) comprises wireless routers that together form a network to provide Internet connectivity to mobile/fixed hosts. The wireless routers are normally fixed in position, but some may be mobile. This project involves deploying an experimental wireless mesh network and testing applications on the network.
Wireless mesh networks are used in scenarios when a wired backbone is unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Compared to wireless LAN hotspots and cellular networks, the access points/routers in a WMN do not require wired network connectivity - they forward traffic wirelessly towards a special gateway with (normally wired) connectivity to the Internet. An example application scenario is a community/village network where high speed Internet access is unavailable to all users. With 10's of wireless routers deployed within selected homes/businesses, 1 or 2 of which also have wired connections, all users within range of the wireless routers can access the shared wired Internet connections.
SIIT has about 40 Linksys WRT54GL wireless routers. The initial task of this project is to configure these routers using OpenWRT (or similar) so that WMN routing protocols such as OLSR can be used. The routers must then be deployed across SIIT Bangkadi campus to establish an experimental WMN testbed. Once deployed and tested, the next task is to experiment with different applications and configurations of the test-bed, analysing the performance limits of the network. An interesting application is the delivery of video over the WMN to multiple users (e.g. multicasting a DVD, streaming Youtube videos).
Two applications of interest for the WMN are:
- Network Management Application: a graphical interface to allow a network manager to view the network topology, and make changes to the wireless routers remotely
- User Access Application: end-user application to allow people to register and log-on to use the network.
Each group will be responsible for one of the applications.
There are various other tasks that could be completed using the testbed WMN. In addition, simulation analysis of the network (using OPNET Modeler) could be performed to consider scenarios with more than 40 nodes. The exact set of tasks will be agreed upon at the start of the project. Depending on the tasks chosen, there is a good chance to produce results that can be published in an international conference paper.
