Constructing an innovative, economical, and secure wireless mesh network: Comparing OSPF and RIP

Abstract

Since the invention of the Internet, the number of users has been growing exponentially. The second largest continent regarding population is Africa, however, Africa is ranked fourth with the number of Internet users that Africa has, despite being and is ranked last regarding the percentage of Internet users to the population of Africa, which is 31.2%. For this paper, Swaziland will be used as example for an impoverished country in Africa. The contribution of this paper regards to the Raspberry Pi, RIP, and wireless authentication. In this paper, implementation of wireless mesh network using four Raspberry Pi’s is presented. However, since there are two suitable routing protocols that use two different algorithms, OSPF and RIP both are analyzed to see which of the routing protocols is best suited to this papers’ network. For the experiments, ping and fault tolerance was used to compare OSPF and RIP while also using different devices from different ends of the network. Though RIP has been sidelined by major companies and organizations, the experimental results show that RIP was best suited in the context of this paper’s wireless mesh network.