**6. Conclusion and future work**

The BB4allTM architecture makes use of omni-directional antennas to maintain mesh connectivity, while directional antennas support information relay over long distances with high power gains. It was found that the impact of multipath and MIMO of IEEE 802.11a/n air interfaces on achievable capacity can be characterized by OFDM modulation scheme, antenna configurations, and multiple streaming of frames or packets. Both the analytical and numerical results showed that the higher the dimensions of these parameters, the higher the achievable capacity due to benefits derived from channel diversity. It was also confirmed based on related previous works that increasing the number of interfaces per HPN and channels in the network does increase the achievable E2E capacity in any arbitral network placement. One of the contribution of this study was the innovation constructed to improve performance of the commercially available WLAN devices. The pillar of innovation was that increasing the antenna gains could improve capacity of real networks even without increasing the power settings of the transmitter.

The CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa, through living lab initiatives, are currently gathering field data regarding end-to-end capacity that is experienced by rural community Internet users. The findings will be assessed with a view of considering possible improvements of future network architectures that can provide high data rates. Other possible exploration of increasing capacity of community networks (i.e., Peebles valley mesh in South Africa) include utilization of unused frequency (TV white space) spectrum. The TV white spaces spectrum fosters high capacity signal transmissions over long distances in rural terrains. Thus, cognitive and foraging radio techniques are promising tools toward spectrum and energy efficient network management for the next billion internet users. It should also be noted that, although the theoretical derivations were applied to the PVM network, they could also be applied to other rural deployments as well.
