Wireless solar-powered router for health isolated rural environments

Isolated rural areas often lack for any terrestrial telecommunication networks, specially in developing countries, which supposes an important obstacle for offering health assistance of acceptable quality. On the other hand, low density and low concentration of population, lack of electricity in many points and accessibility problems make difficult to propose realistic solutions based on conventional technologies. This work presents the development of an autonomous solar-powered wireless node for low-cost static mesh networks. IEEE 802.11 is used for communications among nodes. The network is QoS-aware at the IP level providing reliable VoIP services, and nodes contain a software PBX so that any two nodes in the network can establish a multihop VoIP communication.