Open Access

Michael Rademacher, Martin Chauchet, Karl Jonas

• WiFi-based Long Distance (WiLD) networks have emerged as a promising alternative approach for Internet in rural areas. However, the MAC layer, which is based on the IEEE802.11 standard, comprises contiguous stations in a cell and is spatially restricted to a few hundred meters at most. In this work, we summarize efforts by different researchers to use IEEE802.11 over long-distances. In addition, we introduce WiLDToken, our solution to optimizing the throughput and fairness and reducing the delay on WiLD links. Compared to previous alternative MAC layers protocols for WiLD, our focus is on optimizing a single link in a multi-radio multi-channel mesh. We implement our protocol in the ns-3 network simulator and show thatWiLDToken is superior to an adapted version of the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) for different link distances. We find that the throughput on a single link is close to the physical data-rate without a major decrease over longer distances.