A Low-Cost Efficient Wireless Architecture for Rural Network

Many rural regions around the world, especially in developing regions, do not have good connectivity solutions which are economically viable. As a result, many of these regions remain disconnected from both the rest of the world and from progress in general. In this proposal, I will describe the design of WiFi-based Rural Extensions (WiRE), a new wireless network architecture that can provide connectivity to rural regions at extremely low costs. The WiRE architecture is tailored for the typical rural landscape in several developing regions, in which the population is spread across small but scattered rural regions (less than 1-2 sq kms) within 100-200 kms of the city. WiRE is designed to be a wireless distribution network that extends connectivity from the city to each village. The WiRE architecture has largely been inspired by my prior work on WiFi-based Long Distance (WiLD) Networks [42, 62, 35, 54, 64, 34], a low cost point-to-point network connectivity solution that provides very high bandwidth (typically 6−10 Mbps) over very long-distances. While prior work on WiLD networks [48, 5, 42, 62, 35] has made significant progress in the design of highperformance MAC layer solutions, we still lack a vision of how to design a comprehensive, low-cost, rural connectivity architecture that can efficiently support a wide-range of applications. It is this goal that I wish to achieve in the WiRE network architecture design. To realize this architectural vision, we need to address several challenges at various protocol layers including the MAC, network, transport and the application layers. We will first motivate the need for low-cost connectivity before we outline these challenges in greater detail.