Performance Evaluation of Wireless Router Testbed using Raspberry Pi

Abstract

This paper proposed a programmable wireless router testbed designed using a microcontroller, Raspberry Pi. The proposed router provides a solution to the limitation of off-the-shelf wireless router on its ability to be configured and embedded with new algorithms. The proposed router testbed is designed to have one Header Pi and three Forwarding Pis which act to inject label and forward packet respectively. The evaluation of results is validated with off-the-shelf router. From the setup, it is proven that Raspberry Pi is suitable to be used as a testbed for academic experiment as it has the ability to be reprogrammed. In addition, it has a compact design which eases for laboratories use. Based on the performance evaluation results, both proposed Raspberry Pi router testbed and off-the-shelf router are in line with each other despite the expected differences in terms of throughput, delay and jitter performance. This proves that the designed programmable Raspberry Pi router testbed can be utilized for small-scale hardware experiment purposes rather than software simulation.