Evaluating the communication performance of an ad hoc wireless network using Mesh Connectivity Layer (MCL) protocol

Several routing protocols were proposed for wireless network in order to enable multihop wireless network and the performance of such protocol is evaluated based on simulations. This paper will evaluate the practically ad hoc wireless network and investigate the performance of such network. Several mobile computers were equipped with an ad hoc routing protocol called Mesh Connectivity Layer (MCL) in order to evaluate the protocol performance for multihop network. This paper examined the effect of varying packet size, beaconing interval, and route hop count on end-to-end delay, communication throughput, and packet loss performance and file transfer time over multihop wireless link. Such experiment is done by using ping utility from the source to intended destination. The experimental results obtained show that it is possible to perform multihop wireless network. End-to-end delay and communication throughput is more dependent on packet size and route length compared to beaconing interval. Packet loss is significantly affected by the route length of the network whereas file transfer performance is affected by the size of the file and the length of the route.