Ad-Hoc routing for Rural Mesh Networks
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The challenges of a rural mesh network are very different as compared to the
challenges of deploying a mesh say in an uber-urban city like San Francisco. I
worked on creating a mesh solution using Meraki hardware (for cost and energy
efficiency reasons) and an OpenWRT firmware on it. The challenge was that
in-order to allow an on-demand operation of the network, a routing protocol had
to be implemented. There is enough support for OLSR in the open-source
community, but none for an ad-hoc based routing protocol. I developed a routing
protocol implementation for the linux-2.6 kernel based on AODV, however with
certain extensions like support for ETX/ETT metric and proactive route
maintainance of routes to the gateway (if present).  Another component of this
task to port it to OpenWRT platform and create a testbed.

What is exciting is that my work is going to be deployed at the mesh
deployments of Meraka institute in South Africa (Wireless Africa project).

I also worked on building a battery-meter and integrating it in the OpenWRT
framework, so that this information could be made available to applications
(also routing) to decide on sleep schedules for the nodes.