Tuning a mid-range rural WiFi-based mesh network

Abstract

Little is known about how mid-range, or several km, distances affect multipoint-to-multipoint links when single radio nodes with omnidirectional antennas are used. In this poster, a real network with these characteristics is described and empirical results of its performance are presented. In particular, the effect of increasing the SlotTime value for optimizing the aggregated throughput has been analyzed. Results show the need to increase the SlotTime to considerably bigger values than those oberved for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint long-range links. With the new value of SlotTime, an increase of 115% in aggregated throughput was obtained over the standard Slottime value.