Reconfigurable, energy-efficient, and application-aware wireless systems for emerging markets
Elizabeth Belding, Ashish Kumar Sharma · 2010
The information and communication infrastructure of a region plays a pivotal role in its socio-economic development and can be regarded as one of its greatest assets. Social scientists studying this phenomenon have identified a strong correlation between telecom infrastructure penetration and the growth in the GDP of developing nations. Although the past decade has experienced a phenomenal expansion in cellular networks in both the developed and developing worlds, only a small fraction of the world population has benefited from the Internet. In fact, Internet penetration in the developing nations is still an order of magnitude lower than in the developed world. In this thesis, we present new protocols and architectures aimed at building sustainable wireless networking solutions for the emerging markets of the world. The design of networking systems for developing nations must take into account such socio-economic challenges as low per capita income, high illiteracy rates, and a growing power crisis. These conditions entail that networking systems be reconfigurable to allow organic growth of the networking infrastructure, and maximize the utilization of available resources such as energy and channel capacity. Finally, for the long term viability of wireless networks in emerging markets, it is critical to support voice and video applications, especially in health and education services. The focus of this PhD dissertation is on the design and implementation of systems that provide ubiquitous, viable and sustainable wireless Internet connectivity in rural areas. We focus on five main areas: (a) Reconfigurability of protocols and wireless systems, (b) Energy-efficiency, (c) Application awareness at the lower layers of the networking stack, (d) Maximizing channel capacity utilization and QoS support for the target applications of voice and video, and (e) Network Architectures that support organic growth of networking infrastructure. Our proposed protocols and system designs balance energy use, cost, and scale, and make it possible to provide ubiquitous and affordable Internet access to a large portion of the population in the developing world.