An Experimental Comparison of Packet Delivery Schemes in a Linear Mesh Topology

In this paper, we compare and analyze the performances of two mesh routing protocols (BATMAN-ADV and FLAME) and a WDS implementation of the IEEE 802.11, all of which run on Layer 2 of the OSI reference model. Sometimes the mesh network may simply form a linear topology to provide a service coverage to a line-shaped area. A linear topology can be built without any routing protocol involved, using WDS. The first two routing protocols are a few protocols available in software package incorporated into the OpenWrt OS for embedded systems. Our experiments involves the throughput and delay performance measured on a linear mesh network over varying number of hops between two end nodes. We have used 5.8GHz channel bands to avoid any interference with existing 802.11g radios. The results show that WDS performs best in throughput and round trip time delay. The higher throughput and the lower delay of WDS is attributed to the structural efficiency of the WDS delivery mechanism.