Design and experimental performance analysis of a B.A.T.M.A.N.-based double Wi-Fi interface mesh network

Mesh networks and, in particular, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are gaining a growing interest because of their scalability, robustness, and ease of deployment. These characteristics make WMNs suitable for several applications, such as distributed sensing, monitoring, and public safety. In this paper, we describe a novel WMN implementation based on the use of low-cost double Wi-Fi interface embedded IoT-oriented devices. At each node, one interface provides external connectivity, whereas the other interface is used to create a mesh backbone. On the mesh side, the Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N.) routing algorithm is used to route the traffic flows from external clients (possibly towards an Internet gateway), which can be IoT nodes and/or mobile nodes (e.g., smartphones and tablets). After providing a description of the architecture and relevant implementation details, we carry out an extensive experimental campaign to evaluate the WMN performance, especially in terms of the trade-off between throughput and number of hops.