Long Distance WiFi Trial
Long Ermanno Pietrosemoli
Distance WiFi Trial
EsLaRed-ULA
www.eslared.org.ve
Ermanno Pietrosemoli
Venezuela
International Summit for
EsLaRed-ULA
Community Wireless Networks
Venezuela
Columbia, Md. May 18, 2007
Pico del Aguila

Motivation
• For rural area, Wireless is
the only economically
feasible solution for
achieving digital inclusion
• WiFi is by far the less
expensive technology
available, and can
provide voice and data
• Interference is less
severe in sparsely
populated areas
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WiFi LD Background
• 70 km link operational
in Merida since 2001
• Swedish space agency
300 km transmission
towards a stratospheric
balloon
• Defcon contest in 2004
achieved 125 miles w/o
amplifiers
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WiFi LD Background
• EHAS program for
health maintenance
support in rural areas
• Berkeley’s TIER group
activities in several
countries
• EsLaRed 279 km link
with 100 mW
transmitters and
repurposed antennas
in 2006
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Issues
• MAC of WiFi designed for up to 100 m,
extending the range two orders of
magnitude requires modifications
• CSMA/CA not well suited for Pt-Pt links
• Established Telecom operators vested
interests
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279 km path
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279 km path
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Aerial view of El Aguila site
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View from El Aguila site
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El Baul Site
Accounting for the declination, we aimed the antenna
to a bearing of 277 degrees
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TIER Wireless routers at Baul
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We were able to establish a video and audio
communication over the 279 km path:
Iperf showed a
solid throughput
greater than 3
Mbps in both
directions
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With the Linksys WRT54
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With the Linksys WRT54
The measured
throughput
was above 65
kbps, enough
to sustain an
audio and
video session:
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Can we do better?
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From Platillon:
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Aguila-Platillon (382 km)
• We tried at different power • The Iperf results for the 382 km
settings and there was a link with TIER routers and
considerable variation on the TDMA:merida2:~# ping
results, 10.0.200.12PING 10.0.200.12
(10.0.200.12) from 10.0.200.12 :
• So we concluded that although
56(84) bytes of data.64 bytes from
communication over this path
10.0.200.12: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64
is feasible, further testing are
time=0.745 ms64 bytes from
required to ascertain the
10.0.200.12: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64
stability of this kind of links.
time=0.399 ms64 bytes from
10.0.200.12: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64
time=0.399 ms--- 10.0.200.12
ping statistics ---3 packets
transmitted, 3 received, 0% loss,
time 2003msrtt min/avg/max/mdev
= 0.399/0.514/0.745/0.164
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We then repeated the experiment
over the 382 km path using two
Linksys boxes, obtaining the following results:
• --10.0.1.1 ping statistics ---58 packets
transmitted, 57 received, 1% packet loss,
time 57569 ms rtt
• min/avg/max/mdev =
6.165/11.990/40.591/8.011 ms
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Acknowledgements
• This work was funded by ICA-IDRC
• Dr. Eric Brewer from Berkeley University
provided the wireless routers with the modified
MAC for long distance, as well as enthusiastic
support through his collaborator, Sonesh Surana
• RedULA, CPTM, Dirección de Servicios ULA
and Fundacite Mérida contributed to this trial
• Roger Coudé, author of the free Radio Mobile
Software, which has been so useful to the
international wireless community
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Members of the Team
El Aguila Baúl and Platillón sites
• Javier Triviño, EsLaRed • Leonardo González V.,
Dirección de Servicios –
• José Torres M., CPTM-
ULA
ULA
• Alejandro González,
• Francisco Torres N.,
RedULA
RedULA
• Leonardo González G.,
EsLaRed
• Ermanno Pietrosemoli,
EsLaRed
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Conclusions
• WiFi is a viable and economic means for
wireless links at distances of hundreds of
kilometers when a good LOS is available.
• TDMA over WiFi as implemented by the
TIER group of UC Berkeley has shown a
remarkable throughput greater than 3
Mbps over a 300 km on a Pt- to- Pt link.
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