Sustainable Rural Areas
Network-based Architecture
Farnaz Farid, Seyed Shahrestani and Chun Ruan
School of Computing, Engineering, and Mathematics
Keywords: Cellular Systems, ICT, Network-based Architecture, Wireless Networking.
Abstract: Communication technologies and broadband networks offer interesting solutions for improving human
quality of life. However, the improvements are less prominent in the rural areas and in developing countries.
Partially, this may be related to cultural and social acceptance of such technologies in rural areas. It can also
be associated with the lack of a proper architecture for utilization of such technologies in those areas. This
work in progress is an attempt in developing such architecture. It is based on mapping of existing or
upcoming information and communication technologies to services and applications needed for sustainable
rural areas. Based on analysis of the existing infrastructure and technical requirements, we show that
wireless and cellular technologies are the most suitable choices for this purpose. Integrating these points, a
network-based architecture, referred to as eVillage, is designed. To investigate the underlying issues,
simulation studies for several interactive services in such an environment, using OPNET are then carried
out. These studies show that the proposed architecture is capable of supporting a reasonable number of
clients while meeting basic Quality of Service requirements.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the advent of emerging information and
communication technologies (ICT), the world is
experiencing a new wave of positive changes in
terms of health, education, environment, and overall
quality of life. However, the improvements are less
prominent in rural areas and developing countries.
People living in these areas are struggling to attain
quality healthcare, education, and their general
livelihood. According to United Nations’ report, over
one billion people from developing countries live
below the poverty line. In countries such as
Bangladesh, where the majority of the population
lives in rural areas, half of the population live on less
than $1.25 per day. Even worse, in Tanzania, 80% of
the population live on $1.25 a day (UNDP, 2010) .
This situation is contributing to a large number of
rural-urban population (Rana, 2011). In turn, forming
a vicious circle, that leads to environmental
degradations, natural disasters, poor living standards,
and impoverished healthcare.
In developed countries, access to broadband
networks is seen as a means of closing the gap
between rural and urban areas. Rural Advanced
Community of Learners project in Canada has been
successful in providing quality distance education for
the children living in remote Alberta by using video
conferencing (Anastasiades, 2009). This is achieved
through the use of Supernet, a high capacity high
bandwidth broadband network deployed by Alberta
government. However, with the lack of funding to
build fixed broadband infrastructure, the situation in
developing counties is drastically different. As such,
to realize similar opportunities, alternative means of
communication need to be utilized. For instance, it
can be noted that mobile technologies and cellular
systems are quite popular in developing countries.
The take-up rate of mobile phones in some of these
countries surpasses that of the developed nations
(Vital Wave, 2009). Consequently, mobile and
cellular based technologies and related application
models can play an important role in sustainability in
such areas.
In this paper, we analyze how the Internet and
communication technologies can be efficiently
utilized to improve the quality of education, health
and commerce service of rural areas. This is in part
based on mapping the technologies with the possible
service features. This mapping is then used to design
an integrated network-based architecture, eVillage.
The architecture comprises of three access networks
361
Farid F., Ruan C. and Shahrestani S..
Sustainable Rural Areas - Network-based Architecture.
DOI: 10.5220/0004130003610368
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications and Wireless Information Networks and Systems
(WINSYS-2012), pages 361-368
ISBN: 978-989-8565-25-9
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
for provisioning of education, health and commerce
services. Finally, education access network
architecture is simulated using OPNET modeler. For
reasonable testing and performance evaluation
purposes, videoconferencing is considered. Delay,
Packet delay variance, jitter, packet loss, and Mean
Opinion Score (MOS) values are the key
performance metrics used in the result analysis.
The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows. Section II discusses the challenges in
education, health, and commerce sectors in
developing countries from a technological
perspective, with emphasis on potential ICT
solutions. Section III presents technical requirement
analysis and the mapping of the technologies to
required service features. Section IV illustrates the
design of the network-based architecture, eVillage.
The simulation scenarios and the analysis of their
results are presented in Section V. The final section
concludes the paper and discusses the future works. It
needs to be noted that, as the focus of this paper is on
infrastructure, we use the terms ‘rural areas’ and
‘developing regions’ interchangeably.
2 THE SCENERY: RURAL AREAS
AND ICT
The countries with higher GDP generally have higher
broadband coverage. However, this is not the case for
mobile phone network coverage. Cellular
technologies are quite popular in developing
countries. For instance, with the lowest GDP and the
lowest broadband coverage, Uganda has 100%
mobile network coverage, which exceeds even that of
Republic of Korea (UNDP, 2010). With almost
eighty percent of world population living in the
developing world, two thirds of the mobile phones
are used in these countries. Another point to consider
is that, in spite of high popularity, cellular technology
based solutions developed for these areas are lagging
behind those for developed regions. Generally
speaking, in developing countries, the cellular
technology based education, health or commerce
services are mostly dispersed projects, not being
joined properly to establish a common goal (Vital
Wave, 2009), (PSK, 2010), and (COL, 2008). In
many cases, there is little connection with the
community after completion of these projects.
Moreover, low bandwidth, illiteracy among the target
audience, lack of interactivity of the applications, and
ineffective policies in defining architecture and
operational cost-benefit analysis make it hard for
these projects to be ultimately successful. Global
System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) centric
cellular infrastructure are quite efficient in providing
text or voice calls based mobile applications.
Nonetheless, these solutions rarely use the interactive
features such as video streaming and conference,
recommended for distance education (Trucano,
2009).
The underlying concerns in education services for
both developed and developing nations are similar.
These include insufficient number of teachers, high
dropout rates, and insufficient facilities, particularly
for disabled children. But they are more problematic
for developing nations. Some examples may help in
clarifying this point. At least one in every four
children in Sub-Saharan African countries is out of
school due to poverty, hunger, and various forms of
discrimination (United Nations, 2010). To overcome
such problems, many mobile-based open education
solutions have been proposed. However, different
studies show that many of these solutions lack the
open schooling models that can benefit from suitable
cost effective technologies (Col, 2008) and (Trucano,
2009).
There are significant shortcomings in providing
quality healthcare in developing countries. For
instance, the number of hospital beds in these
countries is quite low, just fractionally better than
two per one thousand people (Vital Wave, 2009).
Only one in every three women in developing
regions receives the recommended care during
pregnancy, resulting in high mortality rates (United
Nations, 2010). The uses of the Internet and
networked systems have received widespread
attention in providing solutions in this area. For
example, UN Foundation and Vodafone have
pursued projects in mHealth (Vital Wave, 2009).
These projects cover education and awareness,
remote monitoring, communication and training for
healthcare workers, disease and epidemic outbreak
tracking, diagnostic, and treatment support. Yet,
different studies have shown that lack of quality
video transmission and effective data storage
technologies, make these projects inefficient (Wen-
Pai, 2010) and (Kumar, 2010).
As for the commerce, developing countries are
facing enormous challenges in coping with the
population growth, poverty and illiteracy. The world
population is forecast to reach nine billion by 2050,
with most of the growth occurring in the developing
world (UNDP, 2010). To meet the demands of this
population, like other sectors, ICT solutions can be of
significant value. But these remain mostly
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362
unrealized. A study of existing ICT solutions in
agricultural sector for instance, reveals that although
farmers are eager to use ICT services, many
persisting issues prevent them doing so (PSK, 2010).
For example, computer based systems are not
operable in the fields due to poor or non-existent
network connectivity. Moreover, the existing ICT
infrastructure is poor and many are operator based
solutions. In addition, farmers need to pay high
monthly bills for the SMS and voice based
applications. High illiteracy among rural mass is also
affecting the efficiency of the applications. Apart
from cellular technologies, low cost solutions based
on IEEE 802.11 and mesh topologies have been built
for specific developing countries (Subramanian,
2006) and (Raman, 2005). However, the emphasis
has been on less densely populated areas.
3 ICT-BASED POSSIBLE
SOLUTIONS
This section presents an in-depth analysis of
appropriate solutions based on the identified research
gaps. Then a mapping is formulated to match those
solutions to various cellular and wireless
technologies.
For each service type, potential areas of
development are pointed out. The primary focus is to
promote virtual and collaborative models by linking
rural facilities with urban ones. To achieve this
target, the first step is to design cost-effective,
efficient and robust network-based architecture. In
order to design such architecture, identification of
available technologies that meet the requirements of
the proposed solutions needs to be carried out. The
next step is to consider the implementation of
effective policies and usability of the underlying
systems. Effective policies can reduce network
deployment and operational costs, leading to stable
models. In addition, given the underlying levels of
technology awareness in rural areas, to achieve
reasonable levels of deployment, user friendliness of
the systems are significantly important. Table 1
exemplifies some of the potential areas of technical
developments in line with these discussions.
We have undertaken detailed analysis of the
various service functionalities and their associated
networking requirements, to identify suitable
technologies to meet these requirements. These
include videoconferencing, video on demand,
telemedicine, e-learning, audio lectures, web
browsing, newspaper browsing, e-mail, text chat/
short message service/ multimedia message service,
electronic banking and other similar types of
services. Each of these has its own bandwidth and
QoS support requirements. For example, SMS
services can be accomplished with GSM that
provides a bandwidth of 14.4 Kbps. However, the
minimum bandwidth required for video conferencing
is 110 Kbps and for ideal cases, a bandwidth of 800
Kbps is desirable. Such a service, will therefore,
require other technologies such as 3G, 2.5G,
WiMAX or Wi-Fi. The required bandwidth for
different features is also related to the utilized coding
scheme. That is, with appropriate coding schemes,
one may be able to alleviate bandwidth requirement
for accessing some features. This will, however,
require more technology awareness and possession of
computing power.
Considering these criteria, a mapping of
requirements of each service to communication
technologies can be carried out, as shown in Table 2.
This Table identifies different service functionalities,
their requirements, and the technologies suitable for
accomplishing these requirements.
Table 1: Areas of development for different collaborative perspectives.
Application
Networking
Policy and Design
Connect urban facilities to
rural ones.
Design a common platform to
share resources, and data
among rural and urban
counterparts.
Design interactive, rich, and
collaborative models.
Design efficient
network architecture to
improve the data
bandwidth.
Match the requirements
with available
networking
technologies.
Design interoperable
solutions.
Define effective policies to
reduce the deployment and
operational cost of network
technologies.
Design user friendly, easy to
use system.
Sustainable Rural Areas - Network-based Architecture
363
Table 2: Mapping of service provision requirements and communication technologies.
Service
Minimum
bandwidth
Desired
bandwidth
Communication
Technology Details
Videoconferencing
110 Kbps
800 Kbps
HSPA: Downstream
1400 Kbs
WiMAX: Downstream
40 Mbs
LTE: Downstream <20
Mbps
802.11 a/b/g: 1-2 Mbps,
6-54 Mbps, 11 Mbps
UMTS: 2 Mbps
EDGE: 384 Kbps
Telemedicine,
E-Learning
Audio lectures
110Kbps
110Kbps
110kbps
1.5-7 Mbps
1.5-7Mbps
700 Kbps
HSPA: Downstream
1400 Kbs
WiMAX: Downstream
40 Mbs
LTE: Downstream <20
Mbps
802.11 a/b/g: 1-54 Mbps
UMTS: 2 Mbps
EDGE: 384 Kbps
Electronic Banking
40 kbps
400 Kbps
EDGE: 384 Kbps
GPRS: 114 Kbps
Video on demand
1Mbps
1.5 – 7 Mbps
HSPA: Downstream
1400 Kbs
WiMAX: Downstream
40 Mbs
LTE: Downstream <20
Mbps
802.11 b/g: 6-11/54
Mbps
UMTS: 2 Mbps
Web browsing &
Enhanced web
browsing/ E-mail
< 30.5 Kbps
< 24 Kbps
< 10K
< 10K
EDGE: 384 Kbps
GPRS: 114 Kbps
GSM : 14.4 Kbps
Text chat/
Multimedia message
service (MMS)
< 1K
< 1K
EDGE: 384 Kbps
GPRS: 114 Kbps
GSM : 14.4 Kbps
4 ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
In this section, we present the conceptual design of
the proposed network-based architecture, eVillage.
As pointed out earlier, this will be based on
considering three access networks that complement
each others functions and services.
4.1 eVillage Architecture
The core architecture consists of three main parts.
They are Rural Area Network (RAN), Urban Area
Network (UAN) and Connectivity Network (CN).
IEEE 802.11, cellular, and WiMAX technologies are
considered as suitable technologies in the design
since these technologies are easy to deploy and
widely available in developing countries. Satellite
technologies are costly in compare to these
technologies even though they can serve larger areas.
In addition, “last-mile connectivity” technology
WiMAX can cover a larger area and efficiently serve
as a backbone network.
Rural Area Network (RAN): RAN consists of
three access networks aimed for for education, health
and commerce. Rural schools, libraries and other
education facilities are included in education access
network. A remote student connects to rural area
network to get access to urban facilities. The health
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364
access network involves hospital, medical centers,
rural hospital workers, emergency system, and
remote patients. Similarly, agricultural workers and
farmers are connected via one stop ICT center. The
core technologies in RAN are IEEE 802.11 and
existing cellular technologies such as GSM, GPRS,
and Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS).
Rural residents use wireless local area network and
cellular technologies for local connection. A remote
patient connect to a doctor in the nearest rural facility
using IEEE 802.11 and cellular technology. Longer
distance from a base station results in weak signal
strength in GSM and GPRS networks. Moreover, the
maximum number of broadband users UMTS
technologies can accommodate is affected by
interference. As a result, only the users near Node B
can get the benefit of broadband. For this reason,
UMTS uses the concept of Femto cells, which results
in large number of cell towers leading to high
infrastructure costs. To overcome these
shortcomings, IEEE 802.11 technology and mesh
topology can be deployed to extend the coverage area
of UMTS.
Urban Area Network (UAN): UAN consists of
three access networks same as RAN. Schools,
teachers, students, libraries and other education
facilities in urban area are connected to education
access network. And this is connected to education
access network of rural areas. Similarly, health and
commerce facilities are connected using their own
access network and in turn they are connected to their
own rural counterpart. In UAN both wireless and
wired technologies are considered available in that
region. They use the available access technologies to
communicate within urban area and connect to the
Internet. However, they use the integrated WiMAX,
Wi-Fi and cellular infrastructure to connect to rural
areas. One part of rural area might not able to access
high speed broadband yet they are able to get
necessary services from urban areas using integrated
architecture.
The connectivity network is responsible for
connecting urban facilities with rural ones. The core
technologies are cellular base stations and IP
network. WiMAX base stations also work as
backhaul technology for cellular networks to connect
RAN with the Internet.
4.2 Access Networks
The proposed architecture is further divided into
three access networks. They are learning access
network, health access network, and commerce
access network.
The primary focus of this study is to formulate a
cellular and wireless technology based school cluster
(SC) model for learning access network. In proposed
SC, the rural and urban education facilities are
connected over wireless and cellular technologies.
The rural schools and students in remote area are
connected with each other via wireless local area
network and cellular technologies. They use Wi-Fi
and cellular access technologies to connect to urban
schools and Internet.
One of the considered scenarios is that rural
students want to join a lecture from a renounced
urban school. However, they do not have broadband
access. In such case, if urban school is connected to
rural school using integrated WiMAX, Cellular and
IEEE 802.11 technologies the students of rural
schools can still view the lecture in spite of not
having high speed broadband network. The teachers
of urban schools can teach the rural students directly
using live streaming, video, and audio conferencing
features.
Health access network architecture also consists
of different wireless and cellular technologies. It
proposes to form cluster of hospitals among urban
and rural hospitals to facilitate rural residents. There
is a common platform to share health information,
patient data, and other resources. To form an
interactive and collaborative virtual health model the
proposed functionalities are video training for rural
health workers, remote treatment, and consultancy
with patients. Commerce access network adopts the
similar service model architecture as well. The model
proposes to create one stop virtual ICT centers and
virtual market place to facilitate the rural
entrepreneurs and connect the rural market with
urban ones.
5 SIMULATION STUDIES AND
ANALYSIS
We have used OPNET modeler 17.1 (Education
version) to simulate different scenarios of the
learning access network. The architecture is divided
into three sectors they are: urban area network
(UAN), connectivity network (CN) and rural area
network (RAN) as discussed earlier in the
architecture section. Both UAN and RAN are further
divided into small zones based on the technologies
the education facilities are using. Video conference is
deployed over this architecture to evaluate the
performance of the integrated architecture in terms of
delay, jitter, packet loss, packet delay variance and
Sustainable Rural Areas - Network-based Architecture
365
MOS. Table 3 represents the simulation
specifications.
Table 3: Simulation specifications.
Application
Specifications
Metrics
Acceptable
performance level
Video-
conferenceing
Packet end-
to-end delay
< =150ms
Packet delay
variance
<= 30ms
Packet loss
<=1%
Audio
conferencing
Mean
Opinion
Score (MOS)
1 to 5, 1 being the
worst and 5 the
best
Jitter
<= 30ms
Packet loss
<=1%
Packet end-
to-end delay
<=150
In these simulations, for RAN the key
technologies considered are UMTS and Wi-Fi. On
the other hand, for UAN, WiMAX is regarded as the
central technology. RAN consists of UMTS and Wi-
Fi client zone. In UAN there is one cluster, which
consists of WiMAX server, WiMAX base station and
the gateway node. CN has the IP backbone network,
which connects RAN with UAN. There is also a
proxy server zone which consists of Signaling
initiation protocol (SIP) proxy server. The UAN and
RAN are connected to SIP proxy server through IP
backbone network. In scenario one, UMTS
technology zone has three rural education facilities,
which are in a video session with an urban education
facility. Similarly, Wi-Fi technology zone has three
facilities engaged in a video session with urban
facility. All these facilities start the video session
with urban facility at the same time. In the second
scenario, the numbers of facilities are increased to
twelve six in each zone and in the third one the
numbers of facilities are increased to twenty.
In the simulated scenarios the video transmissions
are set as unidirectional and voice transmissions as
bi-directional connections. In rural areas the network
has bandwidth limitations and constraints so it is
natural for bi-directional video transmission to
experience poor performance. Considering the device
size and network bandwidth, for UMTS clients the
time interval for video transmission is set to 10fps
and frame size is set to 2500 bytes. For Wi-Fi clients
the time interval is set to 30fps and frame is 4000
bytes. For Wi-Fi clients the type of service (TOS) is
set to interactive multimedia and for UMTS client the
TOS is set to best effort service. GSM Full rate
silence supported coding scheme and SIP signaling
protocol is used for voice transmissions.
Compression-decompression delays are set to 0.02
seconds, incoming-outgoing silence lengths are set to
0.65 seconds, and incoming-outgoing talk spurt
lengths are set to 0.352 seconds. TOS for voice
transmissions is set to Interactive voice.
In OPNET it is possible to set user profile for
each type of user. In this simulation, separate user
profiles are set for UMTS and Wi-Fi clients. All the
clients start the video conference session at the same
time. As in OPNET the video conference do not have
embed voice transmission so to create a more
realistic scenario a voice transmission starts at the
same time with video transmission.
WiMAX MAC layer has four service classes to
support QoS needs for different applications. They
are Unsolicited Grant service (UGS), real-time
polling service (rtPS), non real-time polling service
(nrtPS), and best effort (BE) service. These classes
are related to several important parameters, they are:
maximum sustained data rate, minimum reserved
data rate, scheduling type and maximum latency. In
simulated scenarios initially rtPS service class is used
for both video and voice transmission. 802.11b MAC
protocol is used for Wi-Fi technology zone.
After configuring the relevant parameters for
clients and servers, each scenario is run with the
defined setup. Previously stated metrics are
calculated for each scenario. In the first scenario,
video transmissions experience 1.5 µs of packet
delay variance and 7.8 to 8.3 ms of end-to-end delay.
There is no packet loss in this case. In the second
scenario, the packet delay variance and the end-to-
end delay both exhibit higher values compared to the
first one. They are 1.6 to 4 ms and 80 to 110 ms,
respectively. For this case, packet loss levels in the
order of 2.2% can be experienced. In the third
scenario, video transmission packet delay variances
have values ranging from 0.4 to 2.2 ms. The packet
end-to-end delays are between 100 and 150 ms,
which are still within the acceptable performance
levels. However, the transmissions experience large
levels of packet loss, which are beyond acceptable
performance levels. Figure 1 shows the packet loss
ratio for video transmissions.
It seems fruitful to try to identify the reasons for
such levels of packet loss. The conference server to
base station uplink connection shows a significant
packet loss. To enhance the performance, the service
class for videoconference is changed to UGS from
rtPS. This way, the packet delay variance and packet
end-to-end delay do significantly improve. They are
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366
Figure 1: Packet loss for video transmission.
0.5 µs and 110 ms respectively. Perhaps more
importantly, packet loss improves dramatically. It
comes down to around 0.7% in most of the cases.
Some stages of the simulation even experience no
packet loss. Figure 2 shows the improved
performance in terms of packet loss.
Figure 2: Video transmission packet loss improvements,
after change of service class.
In the first scenario, the MOS value for voice
transmission is 4 and in the second scenario it is 3.
However, in the third scenario it varies within a
range from 1.9 to 4.3. In the first scenario, the jitter is
between 25 and 35 µs and packet end-to-end delay is
110 to 120 ms. For the second scenario, voice
transmissions experience a jitter value between 200
and 400 µs and packet end-to-end delays of 150 ms.
In both cases, there are insignificant packet losses.
With the increased number of rural clients, the third
scenario jitter values are seen to be between 0.02 and
0.24 ms and packet end-to-end delays are between 80
and165 ms. Figure 3 shows the packet loss for voice
transmission.
Figure 3: Packet loss for voice transmission.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Wireless and cellular technologies provide viable
solutions for sustainable rural community
developments. However, they pose serious
limitations in delivering real-time interactive
applications. However, interactivity is among the key
prerequisites for successful deployment of many
several network-based solutions in such areas. This
study examines some of the relevant principal issues
and investigates how they may be overcome. In this
work, a wireless-cellular based integrated
architecture is designed and analysed through
simulation studies. More specifically, important QoS
parameters including delay, jitter, packet delay
variance, MOS, and packet loss for deployment of
some interactive services over this architecture have
been studied. The results indicate that this
architecture can support a reasonable number of
clients in rural areas. Obviously, beyond a certain
number of clients, QoS becomes an issue, which to
some extent can be addressed through appropriate
reconfiguration of the underlying network-based
systems. Our future works will expand the
deployment and the study of the range of
technologies utilized in the proposed architecture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank OPNET for providing us
with Modeler software license, which has been really
useful for simulating the integrated architecture.
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