Deployments made easy: Essentials of managing a (rural) wireless mesh network

Abstract

In this work, we present our experiences of managing the deployment of a wireless mesh network to support real-time voice services in a village near Mumbai, India. We focus on three essential aspects of our deployment: (1) in-network mechanisms for ease of network planning, (2) network man- agement and data collection in an operational network, and (3) fault-tolerance mechanisms for long-term network suste- nance. Especially for rural deployment, where the amount of resources on the field are limited and frequent physical visits are costly, the consideration of these three aspects drasti- cally simplified our deployment and measurement activities. Our in-network mechanisms constantly provided the desired network feedback to meet operational challenges while on the field. We carefully designed and implemented a low over- head and non-intrusive network management module over our TDMA based wireless mesh network. During our de- ployment, this module successfully diagnosed several net- work faults in a live network and collected required network statistics without affecting the primary application. We also implemented a set of fault-tolerance mechanisms in our pro- totype, and during our deployment, our network proved it- self to be robust to various network failures. The villagers used our network for more than a month and availed more than hundred voice calls comprising of local calls within the village and remote calls to the phones in outside world. Copyright © 2013 ACM.