gUesT eDiToriaL
WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT
Junaid Qadir
W
Arjuna Sathiaseelan
Marco Zennaro
e live in a world in which there is a great disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor. Information and communication technology (ICT) offers promise in bridging this digital divide through its focus on connecting human capacity with computing and informational content. It is well known that Internet access has the capability of fostering development and growth by enabling access to information, education, and opportunities. Unfortunately, the availability of Internet in worldwide terms is limited, with an estimated 4 billion people — an estimated 60 percent of the human population — lacking Internet access. People in rural areas are particularly hard hit since socio-economic factors preclude the provisioning of Internet access and mobile telephony in these sparsely populated low-income areas. There is a growing interest in using novel wireless solutions — such as TV white space (TVWS), satellites, drones, and free space optics — to unfetter rural areas from the encumbering constraints of infrastructure (traditionally associated with broadband Internet provisioning). The aim of this Feature Topic (FT) is to highlight the research being done on leveraging wireless technologies for development (W4D), and thereby increase the quality of life for a larger segment of human society by providing opportunities to connect resources and capacity, especially by provisioning affordable universal Internet access. This FT is especially timely since it coincides with the recent push by various companies (e.g., Facebook/Internet.org) and organizations (e.g., the Global Access to the Internet for All [GAIA] research group at the Internet Research Task Force [IRTF]) for the vision of global access to the Internet for all. Overall, 16 papers were submitted to our FT, out of which we have selected four high-quality articles. These articles, written by researchers from leading groups around the world, have been selected after a rigorous peer review process, and present a broad snapshot of the W4D work going on in the broader ICT for development (ICTD) community. A salient feature of all the selected articles is that they pres-
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Adam Wolisz
Saleem N. Bhatti
Kannan Govindan
ent insights developed from real-world field deployments. A brief description of the accepted articles follows. The first article of this FT is “Research Advances on Wireless Community Networks with the Community-Lab Testbed,” authored by Leandro Navarro along with contributors from Community-Lab. This article present insights the authors have developed through managing the Community-Lab (Community-Lab.net) wireless community networking testbed, which comprises more than 200 hosts and is built on top of a federation of existing community IP networks constituted by more than 40,000 routers and 60,000 km of links. The second article accepted for this FT is “Toward Enabling Broadband for a Billion Plus Population with TV White Space” authored by Kumar et al., which proposes TVWS as a robust and affordable backhaul solution to reach a billion plus population of users within India. In particular, the proposed solution uses TVWS for the “middle mile” that connects the last mile (local Wi-Fi clusters) with an optical fiber backbone. In this article, the authors articulate the insights they have developed by commissioning a real-life TVWS testbed that covers more than 13 villages in rural India (spanning an area of 25 km2). The third article accepted in this FT is “Wireless Technologies for Isolated Rural Communities in Developing Countries Based on 3G small-Cell Deployments.” This article, authored by members of the EU-funded TUCAN3G project, discusses the technical and socio-economic factors related to mobile voice and data service provisioning in isolated rural areas of developing countries. The authors propose a small-cell-based 3G solution that uses 3G femtocells for the access network along with heterogeneous backhauling. The authors evaluate their solution using a pilot deployment in the Peruvian jungle and demonstrate that the proposed solution is long-term sustainable. Finally, the fourth article selected for this FT is “SmartCell: Small-Scale Mobile Congestion Awareness” authored by Schmitt et al. In this work, the authors provide an insightful look at the cellular quality divide through an observa-
IEEE Communications Magazine • July 2016
Guest Editorial tional study based in three different settings, including San Cristóbal Verapaz, Guatemala; the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan; and Santa Barbara, California. Based on their findings, the authors propose SmartCell, an Android-based quality of service application that can detect congestion on a cellular base station and improve mobile connectivity by automatically switching in real time between networks (when multi-SIM handsets are available) or through user-initiated manual switching between networks (when single-SIM handsets are assumed). We hope that the networking community benefits from the insights presented in this FT and that it provides a balanced snapshot of the range and breadth of W4D research. We sincerely thank all the authors and reviewers for their help and efforts. We would also like to thank the staff members and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Magazine for their guidance and help.
Biographies Junaid Qadir [SM] (
[email protected]) is an associate professor at the Information Technology University (ITU) Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. He served as an assistant professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan, from 2008 to 2015. He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Access, IEEE Communications Magazine, and Big Data Analytics. He is a member of ACM.
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IEEE Communications Magazine • July 2016
Arjuna Sathiaseelan is a senior research associate at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he leads the Networking for Development (N4D Lab). He is Chair of the IRTF Global Access to the Internet for All research group and a member of the Internet Research Steering Group. He previously worked at the University of Aberdeen, where he founded the ICT4D group as an associate with the Center for Sustainable International Development. Marco Zennaro works at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics on projects involving networking and wireless communications for scientific institutions in developing countries. His research interests are ICT4D and wireless sensor networks. He has given lectures on wireless technologies in more than 20 different countries. When not traveling, he is the Editor of wsnblog.com. He is a co-author of the book Wireless Networking in Developing Countries (www. wndw.net) . Adam Wolisz [SM] is a chaired professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he founded and leads the Telecommunication Networks Group. Currently he is executive director of the Institute for Telecommunication Systems. In parallel he is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of ITG. Saleem N. Bhatti [M] is a professor at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. He has been performing collaborative research since 1991 with network operators, equipment manufacturers, and research and academic institutions in Asia, the United States, and Europe. His research interests are in the general area of networked and distributed systems, with a current focus on ICTD, energy-aware systems, and security-related topics. He is a member of ACM SIGCOMM. Kannan Govindan [SM] is currently working as a senior chief engineer in Samsung Research India. He was the Microsoft Research India Ph.D. Fellow at IIT-Bombay for four years. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of California Davis from 2009 to 2011, and also held a visiting position at the University of St. Andrews in the summer of 2007. He is a member of ACM.
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