Kwiizya: local cellular network services in remote areas

  • Authors:

  • Mariya Zheleva;Arghyadip Paul;David L. Johnson;Elizabeth Belding

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
  • Year:
  • 2013

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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.