Aziala-net: Deploying a Scalable Multi-hop Wireless Testbed Platform for Research Purposes

Aziala-net is a flexible and scalable experimental testbed for wireless multi-hop networks based on simple off-the-shelf hardware that is able to adapt to various research purposes. It is composed of more than 50 Asus wireless routers that have been adapted to either work as fixed base station or as mobile nodes. After describing the technical details of Aziala-net, we illustrate the potential of the testbed by showing two samples of works that are currently under study in the testbed. The first example focus on the use of the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer protocol for multi-hop networks and the stability problem that it faces in the case of wireless mesh networks. The second example focus on epidemic forwarding protocols and their performance in a real testbed deployment.