A Blueprint for a Manageable and Affordable Wireless Testbed: Design, Pitfalls and Lessons Learned

Ioannis Broustis; Jakob Eriksson; Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy; Michalis Faloutsos

3rd International ICST Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TridentCom)

Research Article

A Blueprint for a Manageable and Affordable Wireless Testbed: Design, Pitfalls and Lessons Learned

Cite: BibTeX Plain Text

@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/TRIDENTCOM.2007.4444684,
    author={Ioannis Broustis and Jakob Eriksson and Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy and Michalis Faloutsos},
    title={A Blueprint for a Manageable and Affordable Wireless Testbed: Design, Pitfalls and Lessons Learned},
    proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TridentCom)},
    proceedings_a={TRIDENTCOM},
    year={2010},
    month={5},
    keywords={},
    doi={10.1109/TRIDENTCOM.2007.4444684}
}

Ioannis Broustis
Jakob Eriksson
Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy
Michalis Faloutsos
Year: 2010
A Blueprint for a Manageable and Affordable Wireless Testbed: Design, Pitfalls and Lessons Learned
TRIDENTCOM
IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/TRIDENTCOM.2007.4444684

Ioannis Broustis¹^,*, Jakob Eriksson¹^,*, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy¹^,*, Michalis Faloutsos¹^,*

1: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521

*Contact email: broustis@cs.ucr.edu, jeriksson@cs.ucr.edu, krish@cs.ucr.edu, michalis@cs.ucr.edu

Abstract

In this paper1, we describe the deployment efforts of our 802.11 indoor wireless testbed.We elucidate the challenges that we faced and the design decisions that we had to make, sometimes based on technical reasons, and other times due to practicalities. These design challenges involve: (a) accessibility to the software, in order to be able to modify and implement various functionalities, (b) physical extendability, in order to add hardware in the future and, (c) manageability, in order to configure and update the software easily and quickly, for all the nodes in the network. We justify the hardware and software design choices that we make in order to facilitate these requirements. For ease of maintenance and convenience, each node is diskless, and we utilize power-over-ethernet through an Ethernet connection with a central server. We ensure that the software can be easily modified; this provides for easier module implementation and parameter tuning. We explain the different ways of node deployment, decisions that we make on power settings and discuss how and why the receiver sensitivity affects deployment decisions. Finally, we present our observations based on a set of measurements to quantify the stability of the links in our testbed.

Published: 2010-05-16
Modified: 2010-05-16

: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TRIDENTCOM.2007.4444684