Performance analysis of mesh portal points placement schemes for Rural Settlement Patterns

Internet connectivity in most rural African areas has been viewed as a major challenge due to lack of reliable power, scarcity of network expertise and expensive installation of network equipment. With the rapid development of wireless technologies, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) has emerged as a promising networking infrastructure, bridging the digital divide between the urban and rural areas. However, during the deployment of a WMN, the placement of Mesh Access Points and Mesh Portal Points (MPPs) is an important design issue which drastically influences the network performance. The Mesh Points (MPs) placement problem has been investigated and various placement methods have been proposed. However, the effectiveness of the existing MPPs placement schemes have not been evaluated and compared in Rural Settlement Patterns. Our previous study addressed the MAPs placement problem in rural settlement patterns, and the result was used as the basis for MPPs placement. Hence, this paper analyses the performance of different MPPs placement schemes in the dispersed, nucleated, isolated and linear settlement patterns. The simulation result shows that the Multi-hop Traffic-flow Weight placement scheme performed best in the linear and nucleated settlement patterns, the Grid-based placement scheme performed best in the dispersed settlement pattern and the Incremental clustering scheme performed best in the isolated settlement pattern.