On the Feasibility of the Link Abstraction in (Rural) Mesh Networks

Outdoor community mesh networks based on 802.11 have seen tremendous growth in the recent past. The current understanding is that wireless link performance in these settings in inherently unpredictable, due to multipath delay spread. Consequently, researchers have focused on developing intelligent routing techniques to achieve the best possible performance. In this paper, the authors are specifically interested in mesh networks in rural locations. They first present detailed measurements to show that the PHY layer in these settings is indeed stable and predictable. There is a strong correlation between the error rate and the received signal strength.