Track: Technology for Developing Regions
Paper Title:
Long Distance Wireless Mesh Network Planning: Problem Formulation and Solution
Authors:
Abstract:
Several research efforts as well as deployments have chosen IEEE
802.11 as a low-cost, long-distance access technology to bridge the
digital divide. In this paper, we consider the important issue of
planning such networks to the minimize system cost. This is a non-trivial
task since it involves several sets of variables: the network
topology, tower heights, antenna types to be used and their
orientations, and radio transmit powers. The task is further complicated due to
the presence of network performance constraints, and the
inter-dependence among the variables. Our first contribution in
this paper is the formulation of this problem in terms of the
variables, constraints and the optimization criterion. Our second contribution
is in identifying the dependencies among the variables
and breaking-down the problem into four tractable sub-parts.
In this process, we extensively use domain knowledge
to strike a balance between tractability and practicality.
We have evaluated the proposed algorithms using random input sets as well as real-life instances with success. We have been able to show detailed planning of network topology, required tower heights, antenna types, and transmit powers for the Ashwini project, a long distance WiFi network under deployment in Andhra Pradesh, India, In this case, we are able to achieve within 2% additional cost of a lower bound estimate.
