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Wireless

 

Since early 2004, the TIER group has been studying how to use wireless networks to bring affordable Internet access to rural communities, especially in developing nations.  Our groundbreaking research and development has led to countless field deployments serving deserving communities the world over.  These deployments have been performed not only by us and our many partners, but also by activists who have downloaded our free code and used it globally.

In addition, our contribution has been enjoyed by the open-source community, which has in turn led to many diversified projects based on our work.  Most of all, we're happy and proud to see traces of our code and solutions well embedded into products and offerings by numerous equipment vendors and solution providers, emphasizing the impact of our efforts.

  
 

By 2008, students leading the WildNet research graduated, slowing the progress somewhat.  However their previous work on WiLDNet is still very relevant and applicable today and can be found on this WiKi: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Wireless

In Fall 2009 the TIER wireless research have been resumed by a new team, predominantly focusing on JaldiMAC:

JaldiMAC aims to further refine the technology to match the economic needs of rural WISPs by suggesting a novel deployment topology and an innovative MAC protocol to support it.
 
 

JaldiMAC:
WiFi has been promoted as an affordable technology that can provide broadband Internet connectivity to poor and sparsely populated regions.  A growing number of deployments, some of substantial scale, are making use of WiFi to extend connectivity into rural areas. However, the vast majority of the 3.5 billion people living in rural villages are still unserved.
To reach these people, new technology must be developed to make small rural wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) profitable.

We have identified radio towers as the largest expense for WISPs; to reduce or eliminate this barrier to entry, we propose a novel point-to-multipoint deployment topology that takes advantage of “natural towers” such as hills and mountains to provide connectivity even over great distances. We make this design practical with a new TDMA MAC protocol called JaldiMAC that (i) enables and is optimized for point-to-multipoint deployments, (ii) adapts to the asymmetry of Internet traffic, and (iii) provides loose quality of service guarantees for latency sensitive traffic without compromising fairness.  To our knowledge, JaldiMAC is the first integrated solution that combines all of these elements.  

Our evaluation of JaldiMAC suggests that it fulfills its design goals. Our scheduler is able to provide a 71% decrease in jitter and superior latency characteristics in exchange for a 5% increase in average RX/TX switches, as compared to a stride scheduler. Overall, we find that JaldiMAC performs surprisingly well at this early stage.

For more read: "JaldiMAC - taking the distance further" NSRD2010.
http://www.dritte.org/nsdr10/files/nsdr10_paper02.pdf