Mesh your senses: Multimedia applications over wifi-based wireless mesh networks

WING is an experimental multi–radio WMN testbed de-signed and built exploiting commodity hardware and open– source software components. WING implements a flexible and scalable WMN architecture capable of supporting next-generation Internet services with a particular focus on multi-media applications. The WING project aims at providing an open–platform on top of which innovative solution can be implemented and tested in a realistic environment. WING’s design has be driven by our previous work on the state-of-the-art solutions for engineering a WMN testbed [1] by applying the observed guidelines to a real-world scenario. All the developed software has been released under a BSD License and is made fully available to the research community1. Currently, the testbed consist of 10 nodes deployed at CREATE-NET premises and implementing a two-tiers archi-tecture. Other well-known IEEE 802.11-based WMNs include Roofnet [2], Hyacinth [3], Microsoft’s MCL [4], and Mer-aki [5]. We establish the uniqueness of our mesh solution in that it is capable of achieving both service differentiation and performance isolation in IEEE 802.11-based WMNs. While not providing strict QoS performance bounds, the proposed scheme aims at enhancing the perceived quality of experience by combining opportunistic scheduling and packet aggregation and by implementing a DiffServ-like architecture in order to provide traffic prioritization. The aim of this demonstration is to show that by combining opportunistic scheduling with traffic aggregation it is possible to efficiently support data, video and VoIP services over a multi-hop wireless access network, namely the WING wireless mesh networking platform. Furthermore, we will demonstrate the testbed’s self-healing and self-configuration functionalities made possible by a modular gateway design capable of switch-ing among several uplink technologies (Ethernet, WiFi, and cellular) according to their availability and without disrupting the network operation