WiMesh is the software tool we have been developing and using in the last years of research conducted in the field of multi-radio wireless mesh networks. WiMesh allows to:
- evaluate and compare the performances of a number of algorithms proposed in the literature to assign channel, transmission rate and power to the radios of the network nodes. Performances are measured in terms of some metrics that are computed based on the network configuration returned by the algorithms.
- perform packet level simulations to evaluate other performance metrics such as throughput, delay and packet loss. For that purpose, we exploit the open source ns-3 network simulator. WiMesh automatically setups and runs an ns-3 simulation starting from the network topology as returned by the selected channel assignment algorithm. Thus, the user is only required to specify the network topology and some configuration parameters and is relieved from the hassle of manually preparing a script to launch an ns-3 simulation.
WiMesh basically consists of four libraries:
- WiMesh-core: the core components (topology, random variables, etc.)
- ChannelAssign: the collection of all the available channel assignment algorithms
- WiMesh-ns3: the routines required to setup and run an ns-3 simulation
- SplitRatios: the routines to solve the MPLS splitting-based routing problem presented in [1]
Correspondingly, three utilities are provided to easily drive simulations that make use of the routines implemented in the above listed libraries. All such utilities accept an XML based configuration file that allows to define all the details of a simulation. Thus, in most of the cases, running a simulation does not require to modify and recompile the source code of the utility, but it just requires to modify the configuration file. Additionally, WiMesh includes a number of scripts which automate various other tasks such as the analysis of the results and the comparison among different algorithms.
A detailed description of WiMesh can be found in:
S. Avallone and G. Di Stasi. Design and implementation of WiMesh: A tool for the performance evaluation of multi-radio wireless mesh networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 63:98-109, March 2016. [ DOI ]
Please refer to the above publication in case you use WiMesh for your research work.
