On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 12:13:58AM +0200, Krzysztof Urbas wrote:
Hello, I am writing my master thesis about performance of BATMAN routing protocol and so I build a simple testbed consisting of 4 nodes and configured them to run batman-adv. But results of my tests are quite strange and I don't really know what should I expected.
Hi Krysztof
What is your definition of "performance of BATMAN routing protocol"? What are you interested in?
Building a testbed using real hardware is actually very hard. There is so much radio pollution in the 2.4GHz band you can never have reproducibility and your bandwidths measurements are mostly meaningless. The question is, do you want real world measurements, where pollution is normal, or do you want ideal world measurements?
A few suggestions:
Move to 5GHz. There is less pollution, but still some, so your reproducibility will improve.
Throw away the antennas and use coax cables, splitters and attenuators. By moving to a wired system, you should be able to block much of the interference from pollution. It will not be perfect, since the devices themselves are generally not very well shielded, but it will make it better. It also gives you better control of the mesh, since you can determine the attenuation between nodes.
To make your test setup easier to use, add more linux boxes. Each wireless node should be connected to a linux box as source/sink of the traffic. Using a second interface network these boxes together on a separate network. You can then manage these boxes remotely using the management network, performing tests over the mesh network.
Throw away the hardware and use a software only solution. People have used qemu to emulate nodes and bridged them together. Take a look at:
http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/Emulation
Andrew