Deploying a social community network in rural areas based on wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Due to lack of inexpensive infrastructure rural communities suffer from inadequate Internet access, which is gradually widening the digital division between town and countryside, resulting in degrading both social communication and business advancements. In order to examine the feasibility of constructing a community mesh network using partial off-the-shelf hardware and software components, our research group has designed and deployed a Chinese social community network in the rural village of Beijing suburb for near one year, and then we propose a Pseudo-TDMA (PTDMA) controlled access protocol over EDCA function, which has an obvious saturation throughput improvement over existing IEEE 802.11e EDCA function when the packet size is big enough. The whole project provides the community with stable access services according to sharing a more expensive and high-speed Internet connections, and also presents an actual testbed to explore and solve key techniques and practical issues.