Wifi-Mesh network for Barcelona city
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Categories: Mobile, Administration, Cities, Government, Communications
Challenge
During 2006 Barcelona City Council wrote the “Pla Director de Telecomunicacions 2006-2010”. This document defined the basic guidelines for the corporative telecommunications development for this period. Barcelona City Council identified several relevant trends in the evolution of its telecommunications services and applications:
– High increase in new telecommunication services demand.
– Increasing migration from fixed applications to mobile applications.
– Increase of mobile applications costs.
– Need for specific guidelines on QoS, service availability and security for new telecommunication services.
From this initiative, the Barcelona City Council decided to deploy an outdoor Wi-Fi Mesh Pilot Project for corporative purposes during 2008. This pilot permitted the identification of several key issues:
– Coordination between the different municipal areas and enterprises involved in the project.
– Identification of the suitable final services to be integrated into the new network and the interoperability among different service responsibles.
– Final Services translation (classification) to a Basic Services set: basic service (video, data, or voice), availability and desired SLA.
– Determination of expected growth of services.
– Address and Security Plan definition (DHCP, TKIP, wpa1, wpa2, AES, VPN IPSec,...)
– Network deployment planning taking into account real city constraints and characteristics and considering in how it would be operated and maintained.
– In addition to this, a decision had to be taken about where to install the WiFi outdoor access network equipment:
Private poles or walls à rights of way
Public poles or walls (this was the selected option)
Solution
The main issues the WVP initiative solves or improves upon are: ubiquity and mobility needs for corporative services and applications, internal processes efficiency improvement, reduction in operational costs and improved economies of scale.
The telecommunications infrastructure deployed is based on WiFi access technology. A specific WiFi network variant has been selected: WiFi Mesh. The particularity of WiFi mesh networks is that not all WiFi antennas need to be connected to the fixed trunk network, only a limited number of them have to be. WiFi antennas (access points) not connected to the fixed network get connectivity to / from the trunk links (called mesh links) that connect the antennas to each other, and in particular to those that act as gateways and that are connected to the wired trunk network.
Another advantage of WiFi-Mesh is its capability to balance the traffic load and to support fail tolerance, so if one of the nodes goes down, the network can be auto-reconfigured automatically to find other access routes and keep the service up.
Results
At the end of 2008, Barcelona City Council decided to put the pilot network into operation and to increase the coverage of this WI-FI Mesh Access Network for Corporative purposes from roughly 50 access points up to 680 access points, as the first phase (2009) of a massive deployment over the whole city. This is the so-called “WiFi Outdoors” project.
The services officially started its operations in January and the works for the first phase of coverage extension are planned to finish in December 2009 for approximately a 25% of Barcelona City coverage. Further extensions of WiFi network will cover 100% of Barcelona.
The network deployment prioritizes the coverage of the main streets of the city (approximately, those of the Bus Service network). These main streets concentrate the most part of the municipal services demand.
The access to the network is provided by WiFi Mesh access routers or access points installed in public poles or walls in the street every 150 to 200m.
One out of every 5 to 10 access nodes is connected to the municipal fiber optics trunk network. This kind of node (WiFi routers) is called the “gateway” in the network terminology, and it collects all the service traffic in its WiFi Mesh coverage area.
The pilot has thus far resulted in:
• The WiFi network helps to have a new management model for the City.
• There is a great number of new municipal services that can be deployed (today more than 40).
• New municipal services indirectly help to improve the quality of the final services offered to the citizens.
• The investment on physical infrastructures to support the access network creates a good basis for the deployment of other technologies in the future.
• The cost reduction in municipal services can pay the network operation cost and provide some aids to ROI.
Target Markets
Barcelona’s City Council thinks that the project initiative is a killer proposal for local government and city management. The Barcelona experience can be easily replicated in other cities (Public Administrations) with a similar corporate applications and services portfolio. Of course, every city has to take into account its specific strategic guidelines and needs to encourage those applications that quickly show their benefits.
Several Spanish and European cities have shown their interest in the Barcelona case and some meetings and presentations have already being done: Girona, Alcobendas, Zaragoza, Madrid, San Sebastian, Venice, Amsterdam, Gdansk, Bolonia, and several municipalities of Barcelona Metropolitan area. Girona city, for instance, is also implementing a WiFi-Mesh network to cover most of the city for both citizen and corporative services. And Zaragoza has recently launched a public tender for the implementation of a WiFi/WiMAX outdoor network, also for citizen and corporative services.