Deploying rural community wireless mesh networks

Inadequate Internet access is widening the digital divide between town and countryside, degrading both social communication and business advancements in rural areas. Wireless mesh networking can provide an excellent framework for delivering broadband services to such areas. With this in mind, Lancaster University deployed a WMN in the rural village of Wray over a three-year period, providing the community with Internet service that exceeds many urban offerings. The project gave researchers a real-world testbed for exploring the technical and social issues entailed in deploying WMNs in the heart of a small community

Support for video distribution through multimedia caching

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN048578 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Visawin: visualising a wireless network

Recent years have seen the evolution and subsequent deployment of wireless networking; providing network access to mobile users in many diverse locations. However, the very characteristics of wireless technology means that access to wireless resources can sometimes be sporadic. A lack of signal or interference from other devices can cause a user's interactions with a network to fail. Currently there are very few integrated solutions available which provide both network engineers and end users with information regarding the coverage of a wireless network. This paper describes Visawin, an automated system which visualizes a wireless network; allowing for both improved wireless engineering and user operability. The paper presents the challenges involved in developing Visawin, as well as results demonstrating that the system is useful for both end users and engineers when planning and designing networks

Localising peers in P2P live streaming systems within resource-constrained networks

The use of locality within peer-to-peer (P2P)network is showing promise, ensuring the construction of ovelay networks that are both economically viable for network operators and scalable, ensuring the successful delivery of content. However, the underlying protocols on which P2P overlays are based were originally designed as a best-effort, non-real time transfer medium which is now rapidly having to evolve in order to better support more time sensitive, real-time video delivery systems. This shift places greater demand on locality mechanisms to ensure the correct balance between bandwidth savings and successful timely playback. In this paper, we continue our work to resolve the strong trade-off resulted from the limited network condition in order to support efficient P2P live streaming services. Based on our findings we propose an OPLoc framework for supporting locality and harmonised play points in a live streaming P2P system. we present our results and analysis of its operation through a series of simulations which measure bandwidth consumption at network egress points, failure rates and each peers' play point relative to the live stream