A case study on VoIP over WMN based architecture for future e-governance of Indian rural areas

National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) targets to provide all government services to the common man in his own locality, through state wide area networks SWAN. Latest survey shows that operators are not conducive to cover rural areas of India as the customer density is lower and they spend lesser on phone calls. For the efficient e-governance of Government of India, this paper puts forth a case study on VoIP over Wireless Mesh Networks in order to extend the low cost communications to the Indian rural areas. VoIP over Wireless Mesh Networks would be a potential solution to connect the digitally cornered rural areas of India. In this paper, we presented an exhaustive case study on test bed design for VoIP over Wireless Mesh Network that utilizes multiband IEEE 802.11 access points as mesh router nodes, Asterisk SIP server with Private Branch eXchange (PBX) and gateways with UTRAN interface in order to route phone calls and other services by not using any base stations or landlines. The study seeks details of WMN router node and mesh client node protocol stack, VoIP performance over WMN, hardware design, software design, integration with core network and PSTN and routing calls. The case study concludes that VoIP over WMN based architecture will provide the phenomenal platform to construct State Wide Area Networks (SWANs) for future e-governance of Indian rural areas.