A Practical Hand-on Guide for Deploying a Large-scale Wireless Multi-hop Network

The knowledge of how to exactly deploy a wireless multi-hop network can be of interest for both researchers and engineers. Engineers may be interested in the possibility of extending the coverage area of their traditional access point and to provide ubiquitous Internet connectivity at a significantly reduced cost and some communities have already started to do so. Researchers need large-scale testbeds offering a certain level of flexibility in order to study the behavior of existing protocols, validate their analytical model and prototype their novel algorithms. Indeed, experimental validation is a key phase in order to transfer the academical knowledge from a lab to the real world and this requires the deployment of a testbed. As researcher working in between theory and practice, we needed to deploy such a testbed. Since the beginning our deployment in 2007 we faced many challenges until reaching the current status of our testbed today in 2010, mostly due to the fact that we could not find in the literature a complete hand-on guide of how to deploy such a network. In order to bridge this gap, we provide this technical report in order to share the know-how we acquire while building this 12 km2 testbed on the EPFL campus.