NSDR '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
A Dvaar to LokVaani: extending cellular coverage inside villages of developing world
Proceedings of the seventh ACM international workshop on Wireless network testbeds, experimental evaluation and characterization
Building a low cost low power wireless network to enable voice communication in developing regions
ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review
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In this work, we consider the goal of enabling effective voice communication in a TDMA, multi-hop mesh network, using low cost and low power platforms. We consider two primary usage scenarios: (1) enabling a local voice communication within a village-like setting, in developing regions (2) supporting an on-site local communication among a team of users e.g. during emergency response systems. While there is plentiful literature on the use of TDMA for multi-hop wireless mesh networks, a practical multi-hop TDMA system remains elusive. Our contributions in this regard are three-fold. (1) We demonstrate the working of an 802.15.4-based low-cost, low-power, local communication system (referred as Lo3) using custom made handsets and off-the-shelf platforms. (2) We show the practicability of LiT: a full-fledged TDMA-based multi-hop, multi-channel MAC protocol for real-time applications; especially on resource constrained platforms, (3) We present implementation-based evaluations results of LiT and show that our protocol achieves practical synchronization, and robust operation in the face of wireless packet errors. As the part of the demo, we showcase LokVaani: an interactive voice application for local communication with the help of Lo3 prototype.