Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have proven to be a key technology for increased network coverage of Internet infrastructures. The development process for new WMN protocols and architectures is typically split into evaluation by network simulation and testing of a prototype in a test-bed. Testing in simulation often requires the developer to write software that is not directly portable to test-beds, whereas pure prototype testing on real hardware is time consuming and expensive. Irrepressible external interferences can occur, which make debugging difficult. Moreover, the test-bed usually supports only a limited number of test topologies and sites. Finally, mobility tests are impractical. Therefore, we propose VirtualMesh as a novel testing architecture, which can be used before evaluating in a real test-bed. It provides instruments to test the real communication software, including the network stack inside a controlled environment. VirtualMesh has been implemented by capturing real traffic through a virtual interface at the mesh nodes. The traffic is then redirected to the network simulator OMNeT++. In our experiments, VirtualMesh has proven to be scalable, to have minimal influence on throughput and to introduce only negligible delays (less than 0.4 ms per hop). Hence, it is a valuable tool for protocol and application developers to test their software prior to the final deployment.
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