Design and Implementation of Wireless Mesh Network Testbed Based on Layer 2 Routing

In past few years wireless local area network (WLAN) technology has become a common wireless access technology for mobile computing. Compared to infrastructure access to WLAN networks, wireless mesh network is a more flexible solution to provide wireless network access and it is gaining in interest. Key advantages of wireless mesh network include flexible network architecture, easy deployment and configuration and capability of self-forming, self-healing, and self-organization. More recently, the bright prospects of the technology incite more and more researchers to deploy wireless mesh network testbeds, which are mostly based on layer 3 routing, to estimate the network performance. In this paper we discuss some key technical aspects of wireless mesh network and introduce a new way to deploy a testbed based on layer 2 routing by using Libpcap and Libnet. Our testbed consists of some real mesh nodes and also some certain types of test are used to verify the functions of the testbed.