Abstract This paper investigates the performance of a multihop radio access network. In our testbed, nodes communicate to one access point using IEEE 802.11b and AODV routing. We measure the average packet delay and delivery ratio, if the node movement is emulated employing the random waypoint and random direction model, respectively. We find that random waypoint mobility yields up to 100 % better results. This shows that the testbed performance is highly sensitive to the mobility model, even if comparable mobility behavior is assumed.