Currently, the real testbed part of UMIC-Mesh.net consists of 51 identical mesh routers. Each mesh router consists of a single board computer (SBC), two IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network interface cards, two omni-directional antennas and one 512MB compact flash (CF) card. The SBC is a ALIX.2C2/3C2 board from PC Engines [PCEngines], which is a x86 computer on the basis of the 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 CPU. Besides the slots for the two Mini PCI cards and the CF card, the board offers 256 MB RAM, one 100 Mb/s ethernet port, and one RS 232 serial port. The board does not have any graphic adapter, keyboard or mouse connector. All communication with the mesh router goes over a serial line, or via network connections.

The two wireless network interface cards every mesh router is equipped with base on the Atheros AR5213 XR chipset [Atheros] and each of them is connected to a tri-band 5 dBi omni-directional antenna [Joymax]. While the first card is reserved for router-to-router communication, the second one handles the router-to-client communication. Other variations, such as interface channel assignment, are conceivable but not yet been implemented. In order to cleanly separate router-to-router from router-to-client communication, the first card uses 802.11g channel 1 and the second one channel 11. Both cards transmit at 100 mW and operate in a non-standard independent basic service set (IBSS) mode ahdemo [Madwifi]. The ahdemo omits the beacons and the basic service set identifier (BSSID) mechanism of 802.11. This solves the tendency of the IBSS mode to form partitions which have different BSSIDs despite having the same network identifier (NID). Such partitions made it impossible to reliably operate the WMN with the IBSS mode. All mesh routers share the same extended service set identifier (ESSID) pair, that is one ESSID for channel 1 (router-to-router communication) and one ESSID for channel 11 (router-to-client communication).

The virtualized environment consists of one dual quad core server with 16 GB RAM and several standard Core 2 Duo desktop PCs with 4 GB RAM. The setup is capable of running several hundreds of virtual machines.