Experimental evaluation of IEEE 802.11s path selection protocols in a mesh testbed

IEEE 802.11s is an upcoming standard that defines how wireless devices can interconnect in a multi-hop configuration. While there are several protocol stacks based on the IEEE 802.11s draft standard, there has not been a formal study or comparison examining their practical performance. This paper evaluates the routing performance of open80211s in a real-world mesh testbed. The experiments benchmark open80211s against two established network layer routing protocols - OLSR and B.A.T.M.A.N.. The experimental results show that open80211s does not outperform existing routing protocols in practice. This indicates that more design and development effort is required for IEEE 802.11s to yield the performance that is expected for an IEEE standard protocol.