Broadband Internet Access via Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks: Design, Protocol and Experiments

Abstract

While bandwidth for Internet access in urban areas is steadily increasing in recent years, many rural areas are still suffering from the effect of the digital divide. This paper presents a broadband Internet access paradigm developed in the context of the ADHOCSYS project, which was financed by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Program Information and Society Technologies, within the strategic objective of Broadband for All. Aiming at providing reliable Internet access in rural and mountainous regions where xDSL connections are not available due to coverage limit, the ADHOCSYS network provides a cost-effective solution based on multi-hop wireless mesh network technologies. Starting from a general description of the network architecture and application scenarios, this paper focuses on presenting the routing, QoS and network deployment aspects of the developed solution. Other aspects like reliability prediction, power supply, security and authentication, and auto-configuration, etc are discussed only briefly. In order to validate the developed broadband access solution, a real-life operational wireless mesh network has been deployed in a mountainous region in Northern Italy. The performance of the developed solution has been evaluated based on the deployed real-life network, and the obtained numerical experimental results, along with the practical lessons learnt through installations and experiments are also presented in this paper.