Routing Cost and Latency in the VillageTelco Wireless Mesh Network

Afrimesh is the Network Management System (NMS) used in the VillageTelco (VT) project. The NMS uses both Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) as its network management protocols. It provides a thorough report on network health, such as interference, noise level and latency. In addition, it displays the current network topology and can run at a node thereby making it efficient to identify compromised or isolated node(s). This article presents the performance of a typical mesh network. The performance metrics include signalling overhead and network latency of a small scale mesh network with few nodes. Experiments showed that an additional hop in a network increases the network latency by averagely 35ms. In addition, the signalling overhead of a VT network increases with time at every node. However, the footprint is small and would not impede the performance of a network in a large-scale deployment.