Mesh your Senses: Multimedia Applications over WiFi-based Wireless Mesh Networks

This demo aims at (i) validating the design choices we have made in conceiving and deploying the WING testbed, and (ii) showing the capability of out software toolkit to properly support heterogeneous multimedia applications. Additionally, the mesh networking toolkit´s fault management features is demonstrated. We hope that our wireless mesh networking toolkit is considered by both researchers and practitioners as platform of choice to test innovative solutions and to provide end-users with wireless connectivity. WING is an experimental multi-radio WMN testbed designed and built exploiting commodity hardware and open-source software components. WING implements a flexible and scalable WMN architecture capable of supporting next-generation Internet services with a particular focus on multimedia applications. The WING project aims at providing an open-platform on top of which innovative solution can be implemented and tested in a realistic environment. Currently, the testbed consist of 10 nodes deployed at CREATE-NET premises and implementing a two-tiers architecture. Other well-known IEEE 802.11-based WMNs include Roofnet, Hyacinth, Microsoft´s MCL, and Meraki. We establish the uniqueness of our mesh solution in that it is capable of achieving both service differentiation and performance isolation in IEEE 802.11-based WMNs. While not providing strict QoS performance bounds, the proposed scheme aims at enhancing the perceived quality of experience by combining opportunistic scheduling and packet aggregation and by implementing a DiffServ-like architecture in order to provide traffic prioritization.