Next generation license-free wireless regional and metropolitan area networks. Layer 3 migration for an effective exploitation of layer 1 performance

In rural areas of Italy, a stable and fast internet connection is not always available, due to low population density, which makes economically unviable for traditional internet service providers to build a modern infrastructure based on optical fiber or equivalent technologies. The mission of the association "Senza Fili Senza Confini", which is the first non-profit WISP in Italy, is to provide a fast and reliable internet connection to its associates by using wireless technologies. Since the foundation of the association in 2014, its network has undergone a constant growth: starting from a few nodes, nowadays the network counts about 310 nodes and 8500 regular users. During these nine years new IEEE80211 standards have appeared. The original network configuration was not scalable enough to adapt to the new standards and topology, with the need to provide advanced functionalities like redundancy, traffic balancing and automatic configuration. The goal of this thesis project is to create a new network configuration tailored to the new available technologies and capable of providing all the advanced functionalities required in a modern wireless network. As a result, the bandwidth capacity of each single connection has been increased, from original 12 Mb/s to current 100 Mb/s,