The Construction Of 802.11-Based Wireless Mesh Network And Performance Assessment

WMN (wireless mesh network) is a new kind of wireless access network which supports high-bandwidth. It is an adaptive network which is consisted of similar backbone nodes. The radio link between two nodes can be single hop or multi-hops.Generally speaking the distance between two neighbor nodes is very short and the transmit power of each node need not to be very high. So the costs, compared to the UMTS or 2G/3G network, are fairly cheaper. WMN has a lot of advantages that traditional networks don't have. Also the technology has many strong points in robustness, flexibility, the improvement of network coverage, increase of the network capacity and the reduction of upfront investment. It is especially fit for broadband-access of the backbone network. By now WMN has attracted so much attention that many researchers have focused on the technology. WMN must be surely an important part of the next generation network. Because there are very few hardware-test platforms for WMN in the country, I decided to take building a test platform for WMN as my graduation thesis.First I studied the 802.11 and 802.16 protocols for mesh technology and choose 802.11 Protocol for its maturity. The Wireless Mesh experimental Network is an infrastructure network.And Mesh Routers and Mesh Clients together make up the experimental network.Second, my partners and I successfully develop the core of the Mesh Routers. The development board is a linux embedded system which is based of MIPS architecture. In addition to the conventional functions, this mesh router also supports some new technologies such as WDS, channel selection and handover, MIMO, OFDM etc. In order to build the whole experimental network we put the development board in a "communication box" together with the power amplifier and the video encoder. The PA of the box is to ensure the wireless module of the embedded system sensitive to the radio signal and the video encoder is for the video transmission.Finally, we tested the performance of the Wireless Mesh experimental Network by two means. One is the throughput of the network from end to end and the other is the quality of video transmission.In this paper, we did lots of research on the WMN hardware testbed and finally we set up an experimental Wireless Mesh Network. We also got the properties of the network. To some extent this will provide reference for the successive research.