Performance evaluation of a hybrid wireless network architecture for rural communication

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of Meghadoot - a packet based wireless mesh network architecture for low cost rural community networks. Meghadoot is designed for rural community networks as an alternative for the single-hop last mile. We have built a prototype network for the Meghadoot architecture and studied the impact of multi-hop relaying and constrained devices on end-to-end throughput. The experimental results show that in certain situations multi-hop last mile improves performance in addition to the enhanced coverage and also the presence of constrained nodes brings down the performance drastically.