The pilot deployment of a low cost, low power gateway to extend cellular coverage in developing regions

Abstract

In spite of the tremendous growth in the number of cellular subscribers in the developing world, the teledensity in most of the rural areas remains low. For instance, in India, the rural teledensity is less than 30%. There are a large number of villages which do not have cellular coverage to this day. This lack of connectivity is a major hurdle in the development of these areas. However, many such villages are only a few kilometres away from the cellular coverage. Exploiting this, we present a low cost and low power gateway to extend cellular coverage into the rural areas. Specifically, we develop a low cost, low power 802.15.4 gateway which can connect a number of villages in its vicinity to the cellular backhaul. In prior work, we designed a low cost, low power 802.15.4 mesh network. In this work we show that, using the gateway node, 802.15.4 handsets and the mesh network, villagers can establish real-time voice calls from/to the village to/from the outside world. Such a network also allows villagers to make local voice calls (within the mesh network) using the 802.15.4 handsets. We deployed the prototype of our system for a day in Ahupe village, near Mumbai, India. Using our gateway node, we successfully established several phone calls from the village to phones in the outside world. We also established several local voice calls using the backbone mesh network, within the village. With our deployment experience, we believe that such a low cost and low power system can greatly benefit people in developing regions.