G-Mesh-Lab Wireless Multi-hop Network Testbed for the G-Lab

The G-Mesh-Lab is a Wireless Multi-hop Network research project of the Freie Universität Berlin. As part of the Real World G-Lab Project, the focus of G-Mesh-Lab is to research and develop next-generation multi-hop network algorithms and protocols. It utilizes the DES-Testbed [1][2][3], which offers a sophisticated testing and evaluation framework, making it possible to define, schedule, run, monitor and evaluate multi-hop wireless network and wireless sensor network experiments. The DES-testbed consists of 60 DES-Nodes spread over two buildings. An extension to 120 nodes, including 13 outdoor nodes, is in the process of being installed. Each DES-Node consists of a wireless router equipped with three IEEE 802.11a/b/g transceivers and a sensor node. While the wireless LAN part forms the wireless mesh network DES-Mesh, the sensor nodes establish a wireless sensor network called DES-WSN. Thus a wireless mesh and wireless sensor network are operated in parallel, making the Testbed one of the largest hybrid networks world-wide. The DES-Nodes are deployed in an irregular topology across several buildings on the campus. The testbed management systemDES-TBMS supports the definition, scheduling, execution, and evaluation of experiments. As shown in 1, the architecture of DES-TBMS consists of five components and four databases. DES-Cript is a custom domain specific language based on XML to define experiments either in a textual way or with the help of the web-frontend DES-Web. DES-Exp is the experiment manager which maintains all experiments stored in the Experiment Description database and is responsible for scheduling and executing experiments