Design of a Configurable Wireless Network Testbed with Live Traffic

Testbeds have become standard tools for performance evaluation in wireless networks as they allow for evaluation with realistic wireless propagation and interference conditions, hardware constraints and timing requirements. However, in most testbeds, traffic and user mobility is generated by either using synthetic load generation tools, or replaying traffic traces. Evaluations using live traffic generated by real users, possibly moving around the network, are typically not possible. This is the main motivation of our research: building a wireless research testbed that enables experimentation with live traffic. In this paper, we present the design and architecture of a campus-wide wireless network testbed towards this goal. Our testbed enables both transparent Internet access and seamless mobility to the network users, and supports full network reconfigurations in the presence of live traffic. The reliability of user traffic is guaranteed by failure avoidance mechanisms that are invoked whenever a disruption occurs in the network.