TY - GEN
T1 - Virtual Cellular ISPs
AU - Ahmad, Talal
AU - Subramanian, Lakshminarayanan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2017/10/16
Y1 - 2017/10/16
N2 - Achieving reliable cellular connectivity in rural areas is a challenge for several reasons: lack of economic incentives for telecom providers; high deployment and maintenance costs; low purchasing power; poor and unreliable power infrastructures; poor backhaul support; and lack of ground expertise. .is paper proposes the design, implementation and deployment of the Virtual Cellular ISPs (VC-ISP), a ground-up cellular network architecture that enables third-party vendors to o.er cellular coverage and mobile services to rural areas in an extensible manner. Unlike conventional monolithic cellular network architecture, the VC-ISP model enables a distributed (and potentially disjointed) collection of open, programmable cellular base stations to communicate using a novel intermi.ency-aware naming and addressing mechanism. .is system enables VC-ISPs to provide reliable service with graceful recovery from failures under harsh network conditions. VC-ISP o.ers support for deploying local applications. Here, we demonstrate the technical viability of the VC-ISP model using a real-world 3- node VC-ISP deployment, including installation of a solar-powered cell tower in rural Ghana and additional emulation experiments in controlled environments.
AB - Achieving reliable cellular connectivity in rural areas is a challenge for several reasons: lack of economic incentives for telecom providers; high deployment and maintenance costs; low purchasing power; poor and unreliable power infrastructures; poor backhaul support; and lack of ground expertise. .is paper proposes the design, implementation and deployment of the Virtual Cellular ISPs (VC-ISP), a ground-up cellular network architecture that enables third-party vendors to o.er cellular coverage and mobile services to rural areas in an extensible manner. Unlike conventional monolithic cellular network architecture, the VC-ISP model enables a distributed (and potentially disjointed) collection of open, programmable cellular base stations to communicate using a novel intermi.ency-aware naming and addressing mechanism. .is system enables VC-ISPs to provide reliable service with graceful recovery from failures under harsh network conditions. VC-ISP o.ers support for deploying local applications. Here, we demonstrate the technical viability of the VC-ISP model using a real-world 3- node VC-ISP deployment, including installation of a solar-powered cell tower in rural Ghana and additional emulation experiments in controlled environments.
KW - Cellular Network
KW - Naming and Addressing
KW - Reliability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85040088666&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85040088666&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3127502.3127515
DO - 10.1145/3127502.3127515
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85040088666
T3 - SMARTOBJECTS 2017 - Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Experiences with the Design and Implementation of Smart Objects, co-located with MobiCom 2017
SP - 35
EP - 40
BT - SMARTOBJECTS 2017 - Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Experiences with the Design and Implementation of Smart Objects, co-located with MobiCom 2017
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 3rd Workshop on Experiences with the Design and Implementation of Smart Objects, SMARTOBJECTS 2017
Y2 - 16 October 2017
ER -