Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks Test-Bed with Embedded Systems

There are many commercial wireless mesh networks(WMN) products available in the market but incompatibility issues exist as the method to achieve WMN for each vendor is different and proprietary. This has led to the research of the embedded solution that implements the WMN in accordance with the 802.11s draft standard. In this implementation, it allows the legacy system to connect to the WMN regardless of the platform with the help of the second channel. Besides that, the multi-channel implementation is also used to distribute the load between the 2 non-overlapping channels. The 2 channels are used for the legacy stations to connect to the WMN and the WMN backbone connection respectively. This paper was written as an explanation on how to build the embedded version of Free BSD to work as a wireless mesh router with PC Engines Alix 3d2 and the details of the configurations done. The WMN implementation of the Free BSD 8.2 operating system (OS) was used and system evaluations were done on the embedded systems.