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 management and data collection in an operational network, and (3) fault-tolerance mechanisms for long-term network sustenance. 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 drastically 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 deployment, this module successfully diagnosed several network 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 prototype, and during our deployment, our network proved itself 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.