Long-distance 802.11b links: performance measurements and experience

The use of 802.11 long-distance links is a cost-effective means of providing wireless connectivity to rural areas. Although deployments in this setting are increasing, a systematic study of the performance of 802.11 in these settings is lacking. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: (a) we present a detailed performance study of a set of long-distance 802.11b links at various layers of the network stack, and (b) we document the various non-obvious experiences during our study. Our study includes eight long-distance links, ranging from 1km to 37km in length. Unlike prior studies of outdoor 802.11 links, we find that the error rate as a function of the received signal strength behaves close to theory. Time correlation of any packet errors is negligible across a range of time-scales. We have observed at least one of the link to be robust to rain and fog. But any interference on the longdistance links can be detrimental to performance. Apart from this however, such long-distance...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Kameswari Chebrolu, Bhaskaran Raman, Sayandeep Sen
• Keywords: 802.11, Long-distance 802.11b Links, Long-distance Links, MOBICOM 2006