Rural Area Wireless Mesh Networks Major Area Examination Writeup

Means of communication have achieved tremendous growth in the last two decades and the anywhereanytime concept is becoming a reality as the ease of deployment and the decreasing cost of usage allow a large fraction of the world’s population to use WiFi, cell phones and communication satellites. However, the map of the information world is highly polarized: only 5% of the African population uses the Internet (compared to 70% in North America)[46] and there are more telephones in the city of Montreal, Canada alone than in the whole country of Bangladesh [28]. These examples reveal only the tip of the huge problem of digital divide that can be observed on different levels in our society. On one side of the gap we have the rich, educated and urban, while the poor, illiterate and rural remain on the other side. There are numerous reasons to strive towards the development of reliable and affordable communication infrastructure for those who currently see the telephone as a luxury. Bridging the digital divide directly leads to more opportunities for economic development. One may argue that our target population needs the more fundamental necessities of life, yet it is obvious that although the basic human needs may not be satisfied, possibilities opened by communication can greatly help in provision for such needs. For a long time, the major communication service provides have neglected rural areas since no adequate business model promised instantaneous profit. However, rural areas, especially the rural areas of the developing world, are the market: more than two thirds of the world’s population live in the developing world, and anecdotal evidence shows that these people tend to invest proportionally much more in the communication than their developed counterparts do [10]. Nevertheless, today’s wireless network equipment and protocols predominantly target urban areas, mostly being deployed indoors and without any power constraints. Moreover, current technologies are being developed to work in ideal social, economic and political environments. The technology cannot exist independently of the society and the sophisticated bond between the two should be considered while designing novel communication solutions. Finally, various technical challenges that are not present in urban deployments appear when it comes to rural wireless networking, making it an interesting computer science research field. This paper represents a survey of different aspects of rural wireless mesh networking, the state-of-the-art solutions for the problematic issues and delivers a set of guidelines for the future work in the area. The following sections examine specific computer science and engineering aspects of the problem: different types of rural area networks and the means of planning them are discussed in section 2, MAC Layer issues are presented in section 3 , routing in section 4 while section 5 describes various power saving techniques. In the end, section 6 concludes with performance measurement and network monitoring strategies.