Deployment and Evaluation of a Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have the potentialities to greatly penetrate the marketplace in the next decade. They can be considered a hybrid between wireless infrastructure and ad-hoc networks; no other network infrastructure is needed other than the mesh points, thus providing flexibility in building and expanding the network, allowing for automatic discovery of neighboring nodes, increased reliability and redundancy. In this work, we discuss how WMNs can be practically employed to support wireless multihop communications in an office-wide area. To this aim, we have deployed a real WMN testbed utilizing state-of-the-art technology and analyzed the performance of this architecture when supporting multihop heterogeneous traffic.