-----Original Message-----
From: Jakob Eriksson
Folks,
Me and some pals here at UCR are going to set up a wireless research
test-bed in our brand new CS building. We're just about to start
looking at hardware options, and since many SOCALWUG members have a lot
of experience with 802.11 and wireless hardware, I figured I'd ask you
lot for some suggestions as far as what hardware to use for the
testbed.
It's all going to be indoors, and we need the nodes to be expandable,
probably through USB or pcmcia, so that we can add new interfaces as we
go. We'll start out with two 802.11a/b/g cards (atheros) on each node,
but might want to add zigbee, mote interfaces, bluetooth, UWB and that
sort of stuff later on.
Current ideas for node hardware are Dell (just the cheapest PC they
have), identical used PC:s in quantity, soekris and stargate. Needless
to say, we have a limited budget, and we want to maximize the
usefulness of the testbed. However, time is also limited, so we can't
spend 2 hours to shave 10 bucks off the price of a node.
Anyway, I'd really appreciate any input you may have as to other
manufacturers / products, the reliability, usability and tweakability
of said products, and where to get good deals =). Any suggestions?
Jakob Eriksson
Ph.D. Candidate
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~jeriksson
