Testbeds are a stage between the simulation and the production stages. To this end they must be as close as possible to production environments (i.e. real hardware, on the field deployments) while also keeping the traits of experimentation facilities (i.e. fault tolerance, ease of deployment, testing and data collection). This paper presents WiBed, a FOSS platform for WiFi testbeds based on OpenWRT Linux made to run on commodity IEEE802.11 WiFi routers part of the Community-lab. net project, a global testbed for Community networks. WiBed has been designed to support realistic low layer network experiments (according to the OSI model). This work recollects the details of the architecture, design and implementation of WiBed consolidated during its operation as a testbed as well as two deployments where real experiments were performed.

Peer Reviewed