ElasticWISP: Energy-Proportional WISP Networks
Duncan E. Cameron, Alvin Valera, Winston K.G. Seah · 2020
The provision of rural broadband infrastructure is a challenge for network operators across the globe, irrespective of their size. Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) have shown that the small scale deployment of wireless broadband infrastructure is a viable alternative to relying on cellular network providers for remote coverage. However, out of concern for excessive energy consumption WISPs must often resort to using off-grid renewable energy sources such as solar energy for powering network sites, often resulting in undesirable, low-performance backhaul radios being used between sites. To encourage the development of high-performance, sustainable WISP networks, we present ElasticWISP, a backhaul optimisation architecture. ElasticWISP dynamically controls the configuration of backhaul radios based on bandwidth demands and the network-wide energy consumption of these radios. Through simulations driven by real WISP topology and data traffic, we show that ElasticWISP can offer energy savings of approximately 65% when following our design methodology.