Design And Implementation Of Distributed Wireless Network Platforms

Research of the distributed wireless network has progressed considerably. the original Ad Hoc network is a temporary self-organizing system consisting of wireless terminals which communicate with multi-hop routes. With the deepening of the study, the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Wireless Mesh Networks are derived, which also are distributed and self-organizing. But due to the different application scenarios, they have different characteristics. For all the three networks, in order to ensure the communication, two nodes need at least a complete end-to-end path if they want to communicate with each others. Recently, a new distributed wireless network is emerged, which is called opportunistic network because it get the communication opportunities from node movement to forward data and data is transmitted in a hop-by-hop way based on the "store—carry—forward" pattern.The design of the experimental platform is an important direction of research in distributed wireless networks. Experimental platform not only can be used to verify the results of theoretical studies of distributed wireless networks but also can be used to explore application of distributed wireless network in the actual scene. Now, there have been many different experimental platforms for different distributed wireless networks.Firstly, this paper discusses the architecture of Linux network protocol stack especially the link layer of the protocol stack, which provides the basis framework for the design of the experimental platform. This article also gives some improvements of the link layer for distributed wireless networks. The next discussion focuses on different structures of distributed wireless network:layered structure and non-layer structure and improvement of structures. At last, this paper gives the summary and outlook.