A taxonomy and evaluation for developing 802.11‐based wireless mesh network testbeds

The definition of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has been used in the literature to connote and epitomize the ideal, ubiquitous, pervasive, and autonomic networking technology. An increasing interest has been emerging on the development of 802.11‐based WMN testbeds to test the new ideas and approaches more realistically as opposed to relying solely on simulations. Although the developed testbeds have provided several insights to researchers for furthering the technology, there are still several issues that need to be addressed, particularly, with the approval of new standards, such as IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.11n, and IEEE 802.16, and upcoming protocols, such as IEEE 802.11ac, 802.11ad, 802.11ah, and 802.11af TV White Space efforts. In this paper, our goal is to provide a taxonomy and insightful guidelines for the creation of 802.11‐based WMN testbeds as well as to identify several features that future WMN testbeds should possess. Utilizing these features, we evaluate the existing WMN testbeds. Finally, in addition to the existing WMN testbed experiments conducted at several layers of the protocol stack, we provide a list of open future research issues that can benefit from experiments on WMN testbeds. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.