An Android-based testbed for hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks in the IoT perspective

Thanks to the widespread use of wireless systems with the Android operating system, the presence of intelligent devices that can access the network is increasingly high. Wireless Mesh Networks are proposed today as the enabling technology to increase even more the pervasiveness of the Internet access and as a alternative to overcome typical limitations of existing infrastructure, but there have not been so far substantial contributions about the integration of different technologies. Furthermore, nowadays heterogeneous networks are a promising reality; a seamless integration of different technologies would leverage them to a key element to increase pervasiveness of access and connectivity in the emerging view of the Internet of Things. In this perspective the present paper proposes an open source implementation of an ad-hoc network based on mobile devices running Android, along with its integration with the infrastructured network, in an IPv4/IPv6 dual stack environment. The use of commercial devices for the end-user terminals and the leverage of the infrastructured network on widely used routing protocols enable this solution to be easily deployable in the real world. The developed test bed provides a novel and flexible framework for validation of networking solutions in emerging scenarios with heterogeneous network components.