A Key 6G Challenge and Opportunity—Connecting the Base of the Pyramid: A Survey on Rural Connectivity

Abstract

Providing connectivity to around half of the world population living in rural or underprivileged areas is a tremendous challenge, but also a unique opportunity. Access to the internet would provide the population living in these areas a possibility to progress on the educational, health, environment, and business levels. In this paper, a survey of technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas, and that can help address this challenge, is provided. Although access/fronthaul and backhaul techniques are discussed in the paper, it is noted that the major limitation for providing connectivity to rural and underprivileged areas is the cost of backhaul deployment. In addition, energy requirements and cost efficiency of the studied technologies are analyzed. In fact, the challenges faced for deploying an electricity network, as a prerequisite for deploying communication networks, are huge in these areas and they are granted an important share of the discussions in this paper. Furthermore, typical application scenarios in rural areas are discussed, and several country-specific use cases are surveyed. The main

When Wireless Communication Responds to COVID-19: Combating the Pandemic and Saving the Economy

“…Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, in order to provide connectivity to the unconnected, it is necessary to invest more in digital inclusiveness solutions. Providing low-cost connectivity solutions for rural and underprivileged areas is one of the expectations from 6G technologies (Dang et al, 2020;Saarnisaari et al, 2020;Yaacoub and Alouini, 2020). In the following, we briefly discuss these 6G solutions.…”

The Role of Artificial Intelligence Driven 5G Networks in COVID-19 Outbreak: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Outlook

“…However, with the stay-at-home policy in place, farming activities have been affected because farmers are unable to access their farms regularly, which might result in decline in food production. In this regard, limited connectivity in rural areas has adverse effect on the productivity of farmers who would have been able to leverage internet-based technologies, such as IoT networks to facilitate smart farming activities, such as irrigation, detection of diseases in plant leaves, and collection and analysis of relevant information from their farm (Yaacoub and Alouini, 2020) in order to sustain and enhance food production. Therefore, there is a need to improve broadband penetration in rural areas through design and deployment of low cost networks (Khaturia et al, 2019) and the involvement of government in the subsidizing the network deployment cost (Chiaraviglio et al, 2017) by granting incentives to network operators to facilitate the extension of their networks to these areas.…”

“…In this regard, UAV assistance, as elaborated in section 4.3.2.1, can be beneficial in rural connectivity as well. UAVs can enable and facilitate smart agriculture, for example, by collecting necessary data collected by IoT sensors and transferring them to the local populace through the Internet (Yaacoub and Alouini, 2020). Moreover, UAVs can also be utilized for backhauling purposes in rural areas instead of using other wired/wireless options that require costly (Fadlullah et al, 2017;Fu et al, 2018), Autonomous UAV deployment (Bor-Yaliniz and Yanikomeroglu, 2016;Zeng et al, 2016;Ghanavi et al, 2018) Intelligent resource allocation (Lee and Qin, 2019;Bega et al, 2020) 2.…”

“…Provision of mobile ad hoc networks or pop-up networks for coverage enhancement ML-based UAV deployment and positioning (Lottes et al, 2017;Alzenad et al, 2018;Yaacoub and Alouini, 2020).…”

“…deployments (Alzenad et al, 2018;Yaacoub and Alouini, 2020). They are also good solutions for irregular on-demand capacity requirements, which are necessitated only by special events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.…”