A QoS-aware ad hoc wireless network for isolated rural environments

Abstract

Ad-hoc wireless networks are constituted by routers enabled to establish wireless links among them in a mesh topology. This kind of networks are becoming very popular because of their potential, low cost and ease of deployment, specially when IEEE 802.11b wireless technology is used. There has been a lot of research in the design of protocols and algorithms for improving the performance of this kind of networks. However, real implementations and testbeds are scarce, and even those few well known interesting experiences are not QoS-aware and their implementation details are not consistent. This paper presents the design of a 802.11b multi-hop QoS-aware mesh network specifically designed for isolated rural environments. This proposed network is used as a testbed for driving some initial experiments that aim to measure its performance when supporting both elastic and real-time traffic. The evaluation includes guidelines for a QoS-aware deployment of the network and recommendations for further work that can improve these results. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.