Experiences from security research using a Wireless Mesh Network testbed

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) consist of a wireless infrastructure of mesh routers which are connected to the Internet via mesh gateways. In recent years many testbeds for WMNs have been implemented to test and evaluate different aspects of WMNs, however, none of these has been designed with testing and evaluating security mechanisms for WMNs in mind. In this paper we share our experience with designing a testbed dedicated to testing and evaluating security protocols in a realistic setting. We detail the hardware and software setup of our testbed, the management tools we developed to facilitate maintenance of our testbed. Finally, we show the potential of our testbed by presenting experimental results we gained using our testbed.