The Challenges of Scaling WISPs

Hasan, Shaddi; Ben-David, Yahel; Bittman, Max; Raghavan, Barath

doi:10.1145/2830629.2830637

Cited by 21 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To make the challenges of planning WISPs apparent, we present a brief case study on a network we deployed in a previouslyunconnected region in rural Northern California [18]. Our experience illustrates some of the problems faced by a team of networking professionals when designing and deploying a WISP network infrastructure.…”

Section: Case Study: a Rural Wisp Network Deploymentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This focus has intensified in recent years and researchers have recognized that the challenges presented in these networking regimes are substantially different and require different solutions [3, 10-13, 19, 20, 28, 36, 40, 42, 43, 47, 48, 56]. The various challenges and the approaches described in this body of literature include: connectivity establishment [19,36,40], high hardware cost, unreliable or low quality power [49], poor performance [10,11,42], and difficulties in operational management [18]. While there has been work on protocols and techniques for faster and more reliable networks, research often does not extend far enough to keep such networks alive after the research is done, as the operational challenges in such networks are quite high [49].…”

Section: Background and Related Work 31 Rural Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other systems, such as TowerDB and Celerate, attempt to simplify network management by juxtaposing geographic locations of devices with network information (e.g. IP-address, frequency, and SSID) [18,51].…”

Section: Wisp Network Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Zyxt

Pötsch

Yousaf

Raghavan

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Rural areas are home to 45% of the world's population and are neglected in the design and deployment of broadband Internet access. Beyond establishing connectivity, the planning and design of networks in these areas is often challenging because the complexity of planning such networks often exceeds the knowledge and practical expertise of individuals-even individuals that are experts in this field. Yet, proper planning and efficient network designs are critical to the long term viability and scalability of such networks. In this paper, we highlight the challenges that lone operators who lack sufficient technical support and tools must face when designing and deploying their networks. We then present a network planning tool, Zyxt, that aims to help individuals in planning rural wireless networks. We describe the design and implementation of our prototype and evaluate it against synthetic and real-world planning problems. Our evaluation demonstrates that Zyxt is able to solve real-world network planning problems using relatively modest computing resources within a few hours. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Network manageability; Wireless local area networks;

show abstract

Section: Case Study: a Rural Wisp Network Deploymentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Related Work 31 Rural Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Zyxt

Pötsch

Yousaf

Raghavan

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To make the challenges of planning frontier networks apparent, we present a shortened case study on a network we deployed in a previously-unconnected region in rural Northern California [11]. Our experience illustrates some of the problems faced by a team of networking professionals when designing and deploying a frontier network infrastructure.…”

Section: Planning Frontier Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Helping the Lone Operator in the Vast Frontier

Pötsch¹,

Schmitt²,

Chen³

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While the networking literature is replete with work on managing and operating networks-from the specifics of protocols to the design of management tools and architecturesthere is comparatively little work on planning a network to be rolled out. In part this is because the task of network planning typically falls to carriers (for backbones) and cloud providers (for datacenters), which have the resources and the control to meet their specific needs. Here we consider network planning in situations that are quite different: resource poor and highly constrained.Frontier networks are often planned by lone operators, and while these networks are small in size, they are large in number: they individually serve relatively few users but in aggregate serve millions of users. The key challenge here is the mismatch between the resources of these small operators and the complexity of their network planning. In this paper we detail the difficulties in this context, building on our team's first-hand knowledge of many networks of this type. We then present our initial efforts at frontier network planning, discuss next steps, and outline several open problems.

show abstract