On the Exploitation of the Android OS for the Design of a Wireless Mesh Network Testbed

Wireless devices running the Android operating system offer a novel opportunity to study network behaviors and to observe and modify in real time key networking parameters. This opens up an unprecedented opportunity to study, test and evaluate the performance of techniques operating at different layers of the protocol stack and adopting the cognitive networking paradigm. In this paper, we describe our novel IEEE 802.11 mesh network testbed that integrates Android based devices. The aim is to build a flexible testbed to observe in-stack and out-stack parameters of interest, that can be used to test many networking techniques in both civilian and tactical and hostile scenarios. We provide the implementation details to create an ad hoc network among these inexpensive commercial devices, and specify how to observe and modify the networking parameters at different layers of the protocol stack. Through some examples we show the stability of the network and discuss the time evolution of some parameters of interest.