Real-time Millimeter Wave Wireless Mesh Network Emulation

In this paper, we describe a wireless mesh emulation system that is designed to emulate millimeter wave wireless connections for backhaul applications. As a background, the architecture and special features of the target WMN concept are presented as well as motivations to build a custom emulation environment for developing and testing this concept. The overall emulator architecture and its main functionality is described with some discussions about further extensions. The main idea of this real-time emulator is to utilize network nodes running on network processor platform to implement the WMN node functionality, and to use high-throughput Ethernet switch and 10Gbit/s fiber optic connections to emulate radio layer functionality. The main role here is located in an emulation shim layer that filters Ethernet frames in such way that the required radio layer behavior can be emulated. While this kind of emulation cannot capture all the radio layer behavior, it is sufficient to emulate multi-Gbit/s E band WMN with narrow pencil shaped beams and to capture link layer behavior in real time. This makes it possible to develop and test all link and network layer functionality, including time synchronization, of the WMN nodes.