Interconnection of geographically distributed wireless mesh testbeds: Resource sharing on a large scale

Creating large scale testbeds for evaluating wireless mesh technologies and protocols, and for testing their ability to support real world applications in realistic environments, is a crucial step towards the ultimate success of the WMN paradigm. In this paper we suggest the hierarchical federation of a planetary scale infrastructure, such as PlanetLab, with a number of local OMF-based wireless testbeds as a viable approach towards this goal. Along such direction, we present an architectural model for integrating at the technical level these two kinds of infrastructures and our initial implementation of such a model. We also present some test case experiments we run on our initial implementation of the integrated architecture, to illustrate how an experiment on peer-to-peer traffic optimization can be executed by combining both wireless nodes of a OMF-based testbed and PlanetLab nodes located across Europe. The possibility of running this kind of experiments in such a hybrid experimental scenario highlighted several real-world issues that are worth to be further investigated. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved