Lab to test wireless protocols set up at Meraka Institute
9 September 2005

The Meraka Institute’s Wireless Africa initiative has set up a laboratory comprising 49 wirelessly networked computers, in order to test and develop ad-hoc wireless (or mesh) protocols on a large-scale. The lab will be used to conduct experiments directly related to the Initiative’s Community Owned Information Network (COIN) projects, both in urban and rural areas. It is also envisaged that this research will contribute towards global research on mesh protocols.

“It takes a long time to get a real-life community mesh to this size,” says Meraka Institute’s research leader David Johnson. “By setting up this massive mesh, therefore, we create a test environment where we can timeously uncover challenges with a mesh of this size and make improvements accordingly,” he adds.

The computers are placed as nodes in seven rows of seven computers in the lab, and each one is installed with one or more radio (WiFi) cards. These wireless cards allow for routing to take place from one node to the next, through route protocol software. The Meraka Institute’s laboratory is currently testing the Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR), which is a protocol primarily used for mobile ad-hoc networks. The computers are all remote-configured via a server to which they are connected.

The mesh network in the lab is primarily tested for its ability to manage Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and to provide broadband connections to the internet. “Although the primary purpose of the lab is to test wireless protocols, it can also be used in high-performance computing experiments and to processing intensive calculations,” says the Institute’s Competence Area Manager, Kobus Roux.

The lab is currently used by Meraka Institute staff and it is envisaged that it will also be used by the Institute’s project partners in the future.

Through mesh networking research, communities are enabled to grow a wireless network in an ad-hoc manner without the need for large capital investment in radio masts. The Meraka Institute has installed two experimental test bed mesh networks in Pretoria and Mpumalanga which are continually being expanded in size to understand issues such as scalability and quality of service.

An illustration of the wirelesss routing-protocol 'traffic flow'. The white circles (values), illustrate the quality of the link from one node to the next. The values closest to #1 are of the better quality.

Wireless world in the making: Mesh networking is tested by these wireless computers, which are remote-configured via the server in the background.