Towards benchmarking routing protocols in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) establish a new, quick and low-cost alternative to provide communications when deploying a fixed infrastructure that could result prohibitive in terms of either time or money. During last years, the specification of multi-hop routing protocols for WMNs has been promoted, leading to their recent exploitation in commercial solutions. The selection of routing protocols for integration in WMNs requires the evaluation, comparison and ranking of eligible candidates according to a representative set of meaningful measures. In this context, the development of suitable experimental techniques to balance different features of each protocol is an essential requirement. This paper copes with this challenging task by proposing a benchmarking methodology to experimentally evaluate and compare the behaviour of these protocols. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated through a simple but real (non-simulated) case study and reflects to what extent this methodology can be useful in increasing our knowledge on how real WMNs behave in practice.