Design of weather disruption-tolerant wireless mesh networks

Owing to high costs of deployment and maintenance of fiber optic infrastructure, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with transmission rates of 1-10 Gb/s per a millimeter-wave link (utilizing the 71-86 GHz band), seem to be a promising alternative to wired backbone Metropolitan Area Networks. However, due to the nature of high-frequency wireless communications, such links are very susceptible to weather disruptions, and especially to rain storms resulting in remarkable signal attenuation. In this paper, we present a new transmission scheme for WMNs designed to provide protection against link quality degradation due to rain storms. This method is the first one to use the periodic updates of a network topology applied in advance by means of dynamic antenna alignment features based on forecasted attenuation of links derived from radar echo rain measurements. Simulation studies were performed for real rain storm scenarios to verify characteristics of the proposed approach. Results confirm that by forecasting the link signal attenuation due to rain storms in the near future, and applying the appropriate updates of the network topology in advance, the level of signal attenuation along transmission paths can be remarkably reduced.