Sectorized antennas provide an attractive solution to increase wireless network capacity through higher spatial reuse. Despite their increasing popularity, the real-world performance characteristics of such antennas in dense wireless mesh networks are not well understood. In this demo, we demonstrate our multi-sector antenna prototypes and their performance through video streaming over an indoor wireless network in the presence of interfering nodes. We use our graphical tool to vary the sender, receiver, and interferer antenna configurations and the resulting performance is directly visible in the video quality displayed at the receiver.

We present Cross-layer Unicast Transmission Time (X-UTT), a MAC-aware load-independent link cost metric for 802.11-based wireless mesh networks. X-UTT utilizes information acquired from a network-layer unicast probing system and a MAC-layer monitoring system. It is designed to capture the wireless link capacity and be independent of the load induced by self-interference and cross-interference in a mesh network. We present experiments that validate these two properties on our mesh network testbed. These properties can be further exploited in the design of stable path metrics and routing protocols for wireless mesh networks.