Access to communication plays a pivotal role in the socio-economic development of any nation. While the Internet has revolutionized the development of economic, social, financial and educational sectors of the industrialized world, it has also created a 'digital divide' that separates the affluent and developed nations from the developing and under-developed regions of the world. Significant progress has been made in bridging this digital divide by bringing Internet connectivity to rural regions through Internet kiosks and cafes whereby citizens travel, often by foot, to these central areas in order to access the Internet. While clearly Internet access through this model is much better than no access at all, these public terminals are not a satisfactory end solution due to long travel distances from homes, limited hours of availability, high usage costs, and long wait times.
The goal of this research is to extend Internet connectivity from the point where it is brought into the community by a long distance link (i.e., satellite, long range WiFi, etc.), to provide coverage throughout the village such that residents have Internet access in their homes, offices, schools and public buildings. The research consists of an ambitious, integrated set of research projects that provides Internet connectivity throughout a village in a developing region. The work differs from, and is complementary to, prior work on rural wireless networks in that the focus is, not on the long-distance links that connect the local network to the Internet, but on the development of solutions that provide widespread, local coverage across a geographically dispersed community for currently available end devices. Working in partnership with rural Zambians, a network architecture will be developed that greatly enhances Internet access in rural Africa and elsewhere. This work makes several key contributions:
- To provide widespread connectivity across a geographically dispersed rural community, a customized cross-layer protocol stack for the white spaces spectrum will be developed. This stack includes an integrated PHY/MAC layer, called a transmission layer, that jointly considers interference properties, energy constraints and application requirements to select transmission parameters and channel access strategies to most efficiently utilize available spectrum.
- To minimize impact on already congested Internet gateway links, a novel network architecture and supporting application, called VillageShare, will be designed to isolate local network traffic: traffic that originates and ends within the local community network completely avoids the gateway link. As discovered in preliminary work, unnecessary transmissions on the gateway link constitute a catastrophic problem for rural communities and lead to aborted sessions, dropped connections, and poor end user experience. - To decrease connectivity cost and provide Internet access to users without home computers, this work will develop VillageCell, a low-cost femtocell-inspired system that provides off-the-shelf cellular phones with free local Internet, voice and chat access utilizing the white spaces network as a backbone. - To evaluate the efficacy of the work and influence the solution design, a qualitative ethnographic study of ICT in the community of Macha, Zambia, will be conducted through cooperation with partner institutions. The study will explore the social, cultural and economic impacts of developed solutions, and ensure solutions are designed in partnership with rural Zambians.
- To demonstrate the benefits of our integrated system, we develop RemoteMath, an SMS/voice-based mathematics tutoring system through which students can obtain after school assistance on math homework.
Broader Impact. The work from this award will have far-reaching impact by expanding the utility of Internet access in developing regions. Prior research clearly indicates the vast economic, social and educational benefits of Internet connectivity in a rural community. Through the principal investigators' (PIs) partnership with two African organizations, the work will directly impact local Africans through the development and deployment of technology that solves complex technological problems while enabling practical, deployable solutions. Locally, the immediate impact of this work is the education of undergraduate and graduate students about the vast potential for societal impact of computer science research. The PIs will leverage their participation in the UCSB Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) to create an interdisciplinary course on technology for developing regions. In a time when CS enrollments are shrinking, the PIs will use the societal impact of this work to increase student enthusiasm, enrollment, and diversity.
