CUC106 Assignment 3a: Cape York Mesh Network Project Plan

This assignment presents a comprehensive project plan for designing a wireless mesh network to connect communities in Cape York, addressing the 2020 EWB Design Challenge. The project aims to provide ICT infrastructure, support tourism, and increase internet access in remote areas. The plan outlines the project scope, design criteria (including capacity and weather resilience), and various design alternatives like WiMAX, remote mobile hotspots, and WWAN, with a decision matrix to compare them. Key deliverables include a project presentation with a physical prototype, a PowerPoint presentation, and a final report detailing the design, team roles, and responsibilities. The project acknowledges assumptions about technical training for community members and addresses cost constraints, emphasizing the need for external funding. The references provided support the technical aspects of the proposed mesh network solution. The project emphasizes providing continuous network coverage and handling potential weather disruptions, demonstrating a practical approach to solving real-world connectivity challenges.

Assignment 3a – Project Management Plan
Deliverables Project plan including project definition
Due date Monday 20 April, 11:59pm. Start of Week 7
Value 10%
Marking Criteria See link in ‘Assessment Overview’ Page, in the CUC106 Learnline site.
Task overview As a team, your task is to outline the plan for your team to develop an
innovative and appropriate design addressing a chosen issue from the
2020 EWB Design Challenge and to produce a presentation and report
of the final design. As part of this you need to assign team roles based
on the guidelines in the Week 5 ‘Learning Materials’. You will also need
to refer to Assignments 3b and 3c to enable planning.
To complete this assignment, fill in the template below. Delete all
instructions.
Note that the text below is example text only and you should fill it out
to make it tailored to your team and chosen design.
Prior to submission the assignment should be checked by all team
members.
The assignment should be submitted via Learnline, by the Coordinator
on behalf of the team. NB. The plan only gets submitted once, by the
Coordinator.
Project title
Set up Mesh networks to join communities in Cape York
Project aim/aims
Provide a statement/s of what the project aims to achieve.
1. To design wireless mesh network used to connect the communities of Cape York into reality
2. To provide ICT infrastructure for supporting tourism and increasing internet access for
remote areas
Project Scope
The scope of this project is to connect the communities in Cape York with wireless mesh
network. By using this network, it becomes easier to share the network connections across large
area. Installation of more nodes lead to provide faster wireless network. It is convenient to use in
the warehouse and transportation settings (Roos, 2019). The wireless mesh network is easy to install
as well as uninstall, which can make the network expandable when more or less area coverage is
required.
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The out of scope for the project is that in order to connect the communities with wireless
mesh connection, it is not required to visit the communities. A cost details for the project funds are
also not provided as implementation plan. Training is not provided to the staffs to get technical skills
on handling the IT equipment and network maintenance.
The assumptions considered are technical training provided to the communities to handle
the technical related work with handling work of IT equipment. The project is implemented in
scheduled time with taking full consultation with the community.
The project constraint is related to cost related as proper project funds are not collected for
the plan, therefore the communities should collect external funding from other sources for Cape
York Network Project.
Design criteria
List the main criteria that your solution will need to meet. Eg ‘It must function in all weather’, ‘It
must accommodate 35 students’, ‘It must provide 25kW of power’, and so on.
 Mesh network provides Wi-Fi access to continuous coverage of entire service areas of the
community (Liu et al., 2017).
 Capacity of the mesh network is 2 Mbps up, and 2Mbps down at Wi-Fi access point in
network (Muhendra, Rinaldi, & Budiman, 2017).
 The wireless mesh network must be designed to handle weather disruptions like high wind,
thunderstorms, tropical cyclones
 Connecting to the solar panels directly with bank of batteries work, in the case of power
failure
Design alternatives
Provide a number of alternatives that you have considered whilst brainstorming an appropriate
solution, and the main advantages and disadvantages of each.
 WiMAX- The main advantage of this connection is that it allows to provide high speed
wireless internet connections over wide area. While its disadvantage is that it has high
installation cost and operational cost.
 Remote mobile phone hotspots- The advantage is that it can provide high Wi-Fi range as well
as devices connected to the internet access. Disadvantage is that it turns the phone in
hotspot wears out the battery of the phone in translating to 4G connection into the internet
access (Nellore & Hancke, 2016).
 Wireless wide area network (WWAN) - It covers a large geographical area, therefore
communities located at long distance can communicate. One of the disadvantage is that
private WWAN is expensive (Patti, Leonardi, & Bello, 2016).
Decision matrix
Compare your alternatives against each other using a decision matrix. Note that the below table is
set up as an Excel spreadsheet. Double click on the table to activate Excel. You will need to add
Design Criteria, Weighting Factors, Alternatives and Ratings, and the totals will populate
automatically.
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Coverage area Capacity Power failure
Wi-Fi Range Speed Communication Backup of power
Alternatives rating score rating score rating score rating score
Total Score
WiMAX 60 30 50 45 40 23 30 25 123
10 7 30 39 20 19 30 25 90
30 25 20 19 40 35 40 34 113
Design
criteria:
Weather
disruptions
Weighting
factors:
Remote mobile
phone hotspots
Wireless wide
area network
Design phase deliverables
List the key deliverables from your team (i.e. things that you must produce as part of your design,
such as a presentation, a report, a model, and so on). See Assignments 3b and 3c to help you.
 Project presentation on physical prototype demonstrated design of the mesh network
 Deliver the prototype model with physical 3-dimensional representation of proposed design
solutions
 Deliver of the PowerPoint presentation in workshop and submit video of the PowerPoint
presentation
 Deliver presentation through online class session as team
 Present design project as oral presentation
 Deliver report on team’s roles and responsibilities
 Final report describes design project to the audience
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References
Liu, Y., Tong, K. F., Qiu, X., Liu, Y., & Ding, X. (2017, May). Wireless mesh networks in IoT networks.
In 2017 International Workshop on Electromagnetics: Applications and Student Innovation
Competition (pp. 183-185). IEEE.
Muhendra, R., Rinaldi, A., & Budiman, M. (2017). Development of WiFi mesh infrastructure for
Internet of Things applications. Procedia engineering, 170, 332-337.
Nellore, K., & Hancke, G. P. (2016). A survey on urban traffic management system using wireless
sensor networks. Sensors, 16(2), 157.
Patti, G., Leonardi, L., & Bello, L. L. (2016, October). A Bluetooth low energy real-time protocol for
industrial wireless mesh networks. In IECON 2016-42nd Annual Conference of the IEEE
Industrial Electronics Society (pp. 4627-4632). IEEE.
Roos, D. (2019). How Wireless Mesh Networks Work. Retrieved 13 April 2020, from
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/how-wireless-mesh-networks-work.htm
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