Paper Info
Title
Kwiizya: local cellular network services in remote areas
Abstract
Cellular networks have revolutionized the way people communicate in rural areas. At the same time, deployment of commercial-grade cellular networks in areas with low population density, such as in rural sub-Saharan Africa, is prohibitively expensive relative to the return of investment. As a result, 48\% of the rural population in Africa remains disconnected. To address this problem, we design a local cellular network architecture, Kwiizya, that provides basic voice and text messaging services in rural areas. Our system features an interface for development of text message based applications that can be leveraged for improved health care, education and support of local businesses. We deployed an instance of Kwiizya in the rural village of Macha in Zambia. Our deployment utilizes the existing long distance Wi-Fi network in the village for inter-base station communication to provide high quality services with minimal infrastructure requirements. In this paper we evaluate Kwiizya in-situ in Macha and show that the network maintains low delay and jitter (20ms and 3ms, respectively) for voice call traffic, while providing high call Mean Opinion Score of 3.46, which is the theoretical maximum supported by our system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2462456.2464458
MobiSys
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
local cellular network service,local cellular network architecture,kwiizya in-situ,commercial-grade cellular network,rural sub-saharan africa,high call,cellular network,basic voice,rural area,rural population,low population density,rural village,remote area,present footage,macha community,cellular communication,mobile telephony
Conference
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.76
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mariya Zheleva14112.17
Arghyadip Paul260.76
David L. Johnson3799.03
Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer480671043.73