WMN Plan Tool: Community Network planning for dummies

The wireless mesh network is presented as a solution that is best able to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban areas. Through its multi-hop type of communication, it can extend the coverage of a conventional wireless network to cover more space. However, the deployment of such a network must first be simulated to determine the locations of the network equipment. Several simulators have been designed to simulate the planning or behaviour of wireless networks. However, these simulators have limitations such as being difficult to use by non-computer scientists and requiring programming and network administration skills to use them. These limitations do not favour the deployment of mesh networks by communities due to the lack of local expertise. It is therefore necessary to facilitate the deployment of such a network without the need for an advanced background in programming and network administration. The aim of this work is to develop a new simulator that allows to plan and directly determine the geographical location of the routers in the considered area. To achieve this, we have developed a web-based simulator that has been developed in the Geodjango framework (an adaptation of django for geospatial data manipulation) and the python programming language. The simulator then performs network planning taking into account the type of WIFI technology used, constraints related to signal attenuation and reducing the cost of installing a router in an area with a high power supply. This planning is based on a multi-objective node placement optimisation model to determine the location of the network routers.