Providing Mobile Phone Access in Rural Areas via Heterogeneous Meshed Wireless Back-Haul Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are often seen as an affordable solution to bring Internet connectivity into rural and previously unconnected regions. To date, the main focus has been to provide access to classical services such as the WWW or email which requires the users to use a personal computer or a recent smart phone. In many developing regions, however, the prevailing end user device is a mobile phone. In order to connect mobile phones to IP-based wireless back-haul networks, the network access points must provide a mobile phone air interface, compatible with GSM or UMTS specifications. Avoiding dependence on a costly mobile operator infrastructure, we propose to deploy GSM or 3GPP nano cells in order to terminate the mobile phone protocols immediately at the local network access points. Therefore, voice or data traffic can be carried over wireless back-haul networks using open protocols such as SIP and RTP. In this paper we present a meshed wireless back-haul network architecture whose access points have been equipped with GSM nano-cells. The voice packets generated by mobile phones are carried across the backhaul network in parallel to typical web or video traffic. We evaluate the QoS handling received by the voice calls across our multi-hop wireless testbed and show that our architecture can provide the resource isolation required to offer uninterrupted VoIP services in parallel to regular Internet traffic.

Wireless Back‐haul: a software defined network enabled wireless Back‐haul network architecture for future 5G networks

“…Numerous test results have been published in separate publication [8, 22, 26, 38, 39]. All of which validate and evaluate aspects of the architecture presented in Section 4 or individual component of it, that is, the spectrum and capacity management modules.…”

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

“…3) WiBack System: A system based on WiFi mesh, named WiBACK and developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS, was used to provide connectivity to rural areas, e.g., [156][157][158][159]. It implements multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) in order to differentiate traffic and maintain the QoS of multimedia services.…”

“…In [156], WiBACK was used to provide cellular connectivity to rural areas with limited or absent cellular coverage: Nanocell GSM base stations functionality is implemented at the access side of the WiBACK devices, such that the GSM traffic is terminated at the access point. The GSM voice traffic is then transformed into voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and carried along the web and video traffic over the WiBACK system, using session initiation protocol (SIP) and real-time transport protocol (RTP) to reach the backhaul network, where a SIP gateway allows the interconnection with the GSM and public switched telephone network (PSTN) networks.…”

A Wireless Back-Haul Architecture Supporting Dynamic Broadcast and White Space Coexistence

“…Our outdoor WiBACK testbed at the Fraunhofer Campus in Sankt Augustin, Germany consists of multiple-radio nodes equipped with IEEE 802.11a and the above mentioned subGHz WLAN radios [25]. From a previous project we operate a DVB-T transmitter to evaluate back-haul connectivity to a remote farm using the RFC3077 [26] Link Layer Tunneling Mechanism (LLTM) approach where the return channel is realized via a DSL connection.…”