A Software-Defined Networking Approach for Constructing Rural Network Infrastructure <Abstract> This paper presents an innovative approach to constructing rural network infrastructure to provide Internet connections for remote villages. Specifically, we aim to deploy a mesh network using the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology. Focusing on a hybrid model that combines wired and wireless technologies, we explore the feasibility and scalability of SDN in rural contexts. We have built and compared two SDN deployments (i.e., In-Band and Out-of-Band) performance using the emulator mininet-wifi and the Pox OpenFlow controller. We introduce a TCP-forking solution for the in-band SDN to connect the data plane and control plan. The evaluation results show that the In-Band deployment improves scalability at the cost of reduced throughput and Round Trip Time (RTT) compared to the Out-of-Band one. |