Sparse ad hoc networks for the desert

Abstract:

Providing telecommunication services to remote communities of Australia has proven to be a challenging task both for the Australian Government and the telecommunications industry. Large distances and sparsely populated settlements have limited the deployment of current broadband technologies because of the cost and the insufficient return on investment to recover and maintain the advanced networking infrastructures. In early 2000, a number of different inquiries identified that the gap between the service provision in remote and metropolitan areas has increased and there is a real need for technologies that can provide broadband-type services to remote regions with low initial deployment and maintenance costs. The Sparse Ad hoc Network for Desert (SAND) project is an initiative of the Desert Knowledge CRC and the University of Wollongong. It started in July 2004. The aim of the project is to develop and provide cost-effective and innovative telecommunications technologies for the remote and rural settlements of Australia. In this document, we provide a summary of the achievements and activities of the project to September 2006. The initial focus of the project was based on developing cost-effective voice and data services for remote Aboriginal settlements. This included a major field study based on the telecommunications requirements of the Ngaanyatjarra settlements in Western Australia. From this, and an extensive desktop study based on a number of regional telecommunication inquiries, we identified a number of service requirements such as access to cost-effective and higher capacity data networks. We then studied the types of technologies that could be used to address the identified service requirements. This included a desktop study of a number of emerging networking technologies such as ad hoc networks and the 802.11 radio technology, and a number of simulation studies to predict their performance in sparse desert conditions. The studies showed that ad hoc networking technologies based on the 802.11 radio could be combined to design new telecommunications hardware to address a number of the service requirements identified. To further investigate this new concept, we developed a prototype networking device called Sparsenet’s Outback Phone and Internet (SOPHI). SOPHI provides residential voice and data service, which allows users to make direct voice calls without connecting to a base station. The voice service is based on the popular Voice over IP technology which is commonly used to make cheap long distance calls. SOPHI also provides a broadband data port, which can be used to connect end-user nodes to the Internet. We also developed a number of other prototypes to provide long-range network connectivity. An example is the High-powered Multi-radio Ad hoc Node, which combines the idea of ad hoc networking with high-powered radio devices to create a backbone network. In Chapter 2 of this report, we present the project background and a summary of our achievements to September 2006. In Chapter 3, we present the findings of a case study on Ngaanyatjarra settlements; the case study identifies a number of key telecommunication requirements in that region. In Chapter 4, we summarise the telecommunication service requirements based on our desktop and field studies. In Chapter 5, we describe candidate technologies for addressing the telecommunication service requirements identified. We present a theoretical study of the candidate ad hoc networking technology in Chapter 6. We illustrate the application of the candidate ad hoc network technology over various types of networking scenarios in Chapter 7. And in Chapters 8 and 9, we describe the performance of the ad hoc networking prototypes developed in this project.