Routing Across Wired and Wireless Mesh Networks: Experimental Compound Internetworking with OSPF

As wireless mesh networks are deployed, a new concept emerges: compound internetworks, i.e., internetworks that contain both wired networks and wireless mesh networks. Routing is one of the key challenges that arises in compound internetworks: indeed, while specific routing protocols are typically used for wired networks on one hand, and for wireless mesh networks on the other hand, it has been observed that operating a single routing protocol to manage a compound internetwork as a whole brings several advantages. In this realm, the IETF has thus standardized protocol extensions to Open Shortest Path First (OSPF, the routing protocol used by more than 50 % of the wired routers in today's Internet), enabling OSPF to operate simultaneously on wired networks, and on wireless mesh or moderately mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This paper evaluates the performance of OSPF coupled with such a protocol extension for MANETs on an experimental compound internetwork testbed. This paper reports on experiments carried out with OSPF operating simultaneously over Ethernet and 802.11b. Despite the limitations of the testbed, these experiments provide both a proof-of-concept and complementary results compared to prior work in the domain, which was mostly based on simulations, and focused on wireless ad hoc network scenarios only.