BMBF Project: G-Mesh-Lab
It becomes more and more obvious that current networking standards and technologies will not satisfy the requirements of the Future Internet. To fulfil these demands, research has to focus on the development and investigation of new approaches. Therefor, the G-Lab project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) created a German-wide network laboratory, the German Lab testbed, which currently consists of over 170 nodes. The project is related to the world-wide Planet Lab facility but provides a much more defined setting in terms of homogeneous hardware and full controll over the network architecture. Thus, clean slate approaches could be studied in this project as well as extensions and modifications of existing technologies.
The Future Internet will not only consist of wired nodes but will comprise a huge plurality of hetergeneous wireless systems. On the one hand Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET) and Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) based on IEEE 802.2.11 WLAN technology can act as access networks for other clients. On the other hand Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and other tiny, embedded systems will form the Internet of Things.
The G-Mesh-Lab project as part of the Real-World G-Lab connects the DES-Testbed to the German Lab in order to study the interconnection of these wireless networks to the Future Internet and determine fitting metrics and protocols to integrate them. Within the scope of this project the testbed gets extended. Several outdoor nodes have been added to fit real-world settings even closer, and, in addition, mobile nodes using a small robot and Android based smart phones are in the process of development. To investigate the feasibility of new protocols like 6LoWPAN for a variety of low power devices such as sensor nodes a real-time capable kernel µkleos was developed.