Design and evaluation of a new MAC protocol for long-distance 802.11 mesh networks
Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
MobiSteer: using steerable beam directional antenna for vehicular network access
Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
FRACTEL: a fresh perspective on (rural) mesh networks
Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
Beyond pilots: keeping rural wireless networks alive
NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Optimal scheduling and power control for tdma based point to multipoint wireless networks
Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
WiLdnet: design and implementation of high performancewifi based long distance networks
NSDI'07 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Networked systems design & implementation
Economic analysis of networking technologies for rural developing regions
WINE'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Internet and Network Economics
WiFiRe: rural area broadband access using the WiFi PHY and a multisector TDD MAC
IEEE Communications Magazine
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WiFi-based point-to-multipoint systems are a cost-effective solution for providing high-bandwidth connectivity to remote rural regions. However, current point-to-multipoint deployments are hampered by several challenges. Their capacity to support a large number of clients simply by increasing the number of radios at the base station is limited because space restrictions on radio towers bound the number of antennas that can be installed at one physical location. Also the limited availability of wireless channels restricts the number of clients that can be simultaneously supported by a base station at any point of time. In this paper, we explore high-throughput architectures for point-to-multipoint networks. We show how we can increase the number of radios at the base station without increasing the number of antennas simultaneously. We propose a simple yet practical multiplexing design that uses cheap RF combiner/splitter devices for multiplexing several radios onto a single antenna. We also examine a more general design that uses RF switches, and which allows us to allocate radios to antennas dynamically based on client traffic demands. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate and evaluate the simple case of combining up to three radios operating on different channels onto only one antenna, using off-the-shelf combiner/splitters and attenuators. We show that not only is such a design feasible, but also that the achieved link throughput in both directions is as good as the one obtained by using separate antennas for each radio, as long as we provide sufficient RF isolation between the multiplexed radios.