Technical Report: Design, Implementation and Deployment of Intermittency-aware Cellular Edge Services for Rural areas

Rural areas continue to be plagued by limited data connectivity due to poor and unreliable power infrastructure, poor backhaul connectivity and lack of economic incentives for telecom providers. These factors continue to be an impediment to providing reliable, highly available and bandwidth intensive mobile services and applications to function well in such contexts. This paper presents the design, implementation and deployment of GreenLinks, a new ground-up platform that enables intermittency-aware, reliable and available cellular services and application support in rural contexts under extreme operational environments with limited power and no existing cellular coverage. Unlike the conventional monolithic cellular network architecture, GreenLinks enables a distributed (and potentially disjoint) collection of open, programmable cellular base stations to offer a gamut of both conventional cellular services and new forms of distributed edge services. GreenLinks offers new application primitives to support different types of intermittency-aware distributed mobile edge services including P2P transactions, voice-based social media applications, and distributed mobile sensing applications. Using a participatory sensing white spaces approach, a GreenLinks base station can co-exist with other conventional cellular networks.