Evaluation and Optimization of IEEE802.11 multi-hop Backhaul Networks with Directional Antennas

A major problem for rural areas is the inaccessibility to affordable broadband Internet connections. In these areas distances are large, and digging a cable into the ground is extremely expensive, considering the small number of potential customers at the end of that cable. This leads to a digital divide, where urban areas enjoy a high-quality service at low cost, while rural areas suffer from the reverse. This work is dedicated to an alternative technical approach aiming to reduce the cost for Internet Service Provider in rural areas: WiFi-based Long Distance networks. A set of significant contributions of technology related aspects of WiFi-based Long Distance networks is described in three different fields: Propagation on long distance Wi-Fi links, MAC-layer scheduling and Interference modeling and Channel Assignment with directional antennas. For each field, the author composes and discusses the state-of-the-art. Afterwards, the author derives research questions and tackles several open issues to develop these kinds of networks further towards a suitable technology for the backhaul segment