The use of Internet connectivity for remote patient monitoring is often unsuitable for rural communities where Internet infrastructure is lacking, and power outages are frequent. This paper explores the rural connectivity problem in the context of remote patient monitoring and analyzes the feasibility of utilizing a delay tolerant network (DTN) architecture that leverages the social behaviors of rural community members to enable out-of-range monitoring of patients in rural communities without local transportation systems. The feasibility is characterized using delivery latency and delivery rate with the number of participants and the number of sources as variables. The architecture is evaluated for Owingsville, KY using U.S. Census Bureau, the National Cancer Institute's, and IPUMS ATUS sample data. The findings show that within a 24 hour window, there is an exponential relationship between the number of participants in the network and the delivery rate with a minimal delivery of 38.7%, a maximal delivery rate of a 100% and an overall average delivery rate of 89.8%.
Current remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems are fully reliant on the Internet. However, complete reliance on Internet connectivity is impractical in rural and remote environments where modern infrastructure is often lacking, power outages are frequent, and/or network connectivity is sparse (e.g. rural communities, mountainous regions of Appalachia, American Indian reservations, developing countries, and natural disaster situations). This paper proposes augmenting intermittent Internet with opportunistic communication to leverage the social behaviors of patients, caregivers, and community m…
The concept of the IXP, an Ethernet fabric central to the structure of the global Internet, is largely absent from the development of community-driven collaborative network infrastructure. The reasons for this are two-fold. IXPs exist in central, typically urban, environments where strong network infrastructure ensures high levels of connectivity. Between rural and remote regions, where networks are separated by distance and terrain, no such infrastructure exists. In this paper we present RemIX a distributed IXPs architecture designed for the community network environment. We examine this prax…
In emergency patient transport from rural medical facility to center tertiary hospital, real-time monitoring of the patient in the ambulance by a physician expert at the tertiary center is crucial. While telemetry healthcare services using mobile networks may enable remote real-time monitoring of transported patients, physiologic measures and tracking are at least as important and requires the existence of high-fidelity communication coverage. However, the wireless networks along the roads especially in rural areas can range from 4G to low-speed 2G, some parts with communication breakage. From…
As Mobile Networks (MNs) are advancing towards meeting mobile users requirements, the rural-urban divide still remains a major challenge. While areas within the urban space (metropolitan mobile space) are being developed, rural areas are left behind. Due to challenges of low population density, low income, difficult terrain, non-existent infrastructure, lack of power grid, remote areas have low digital penetration. This situation makes remote areas less attractive towards investments and to operate connectivity networks, thus failing to achieve universal access to the Internet. In addressing t…
This letter proposes a neural network (NN) aided remote unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) online control algorithm, coined oHJB. By downloading a UAV's state, a base station (BS) trains an HJB NN that solves the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation (HJB) in real time, yielding the optimal control action. Initially, the BS uploads this control action to the UAV. If the HJB NN is sufficiently trained and the UAV is far away, the BS uploads the HJB NN model, enabling to locally carry out control decisions even when the connection is lost. Simulations corroborate the effectiveness of oHJB in reducing the …
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to overcome the deployment constraint of Internet of Things (IoT) in remote or rural area. Wirelessly powered communications (WPC) can address the battery limitation of IoT devices through transferring wireless power to IoT devices. The integration of UAVs and WPC, namely UAV-enabled Wireless Powering IoT (Ue-WPIoT) can greatly extend the IoT applications from cities to remote or rural areas. In this article, we present a state-of-the-art overview of Ue-WPIoT by first illustrating the working flow of Ue-WPIoT and discussing the challenges. We …
A significant barrier in providing affordable rural broadband is to connect the rural and remote places to the optical Point of Presence (PoP) over distances of few kilometers. A lot of work has been done in the area of long distance Wi-Fi networks. However, these networks require tall towers and high gain (directional) antennas. Also, they work in the unlicensed band which has Effective Isotropically Radiated Power (EIRP) limit (e.g. 1 W in India) which restricts the network design. In this work, we propose a Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network operating in TV UHF to connect the remo…
Opportunistic networks could become the solution to provide communication support in both cities where the cellular network could be overloaded, and in scenarios where a fixed infrastructure is not available, like in remote and developing regions. A critical issue that still requires a satisfactory solution is the design of an efficient data delivery solution. Social characteristics are recently being considered as a promising alternative. Most opportunistic network applications rely on the different mobile devices carried by users, and whose behavior affects the use of the device itself. This…
In telecommunications, network service accessibility as a requirement is closely related to equitably serving the population residing at locations that can most appropriately be described as remote. Remote connectivity, however, would have benefited from a more inclusive consideration in the existing generations of mobile communications. To remedy this, sustainability and its social impact are being positioned as key drivers of sixth generation's (6G) research and standardization activities. In particular, there has been a conscious attempt to understand the demands of remote wireless connecti…
In many places all over the world rural and remote areas lack proper connectivity that has led to increasing digital divide. These areas might have low population density, low incomes, etc., making them less attractive places to invest and operate connectivity networks. 6G could be the first mobile radio generation truly aiming to close the digital divide. However, in order to do so, special requirements and challenges have to be considered since the beginning of the design process. The aim of this white paper is to discuss requirements and challenges and point out related, identified research…
This paper studies the potential improvement in the achievable data rate available to ground users by integrating satellite, airborne, and terrestrial networks. The goal is to establish dynamic wireless services in remote or infrastructure-less areas. This integration uses high-altitude platforms in the exosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere for better altitude reuse coupled with emerging optical or other high-frequency directional transceivers. Hence they offer a significant increases in the scarce spectrum aggregate efficiency. However, managing resource allocation with deployment in this …
The revolutionary trend of the up-to-date medicine can be formulated as wide introduction into basic medicine fields of electronic (e-health) and mobile (m-health) healthcare services and information applications. Unfortunately, all list of qualified m/e-healthcare services can be provided cost-effectively only in urban areas very good covered by broadband 4G/5G wireless communications. Unacceptably high investments are required into deployment of the optic core infrastructure for ubiquitous wide covering of sparsely populated rural, remote, and difficult for access (RRD) areas using the recen…
One of the major impediments to providing broadband connectivity in semi-urban and rural India is the lack of robust and affordable backhaul. Fiber connectivity in terms of backhaul that is being planned (or provided) by the Government of India would reach only till rural offices (named Gram Panchayat) in the Indian rural areas. In this exposition, we articulate how TV white space can address the challenge in providing broadband connectivity to a billion plus population within India. The villages can form local Wi-Fi clusters. The problem of connecting the Wi-Fi clusters to the optical fiber p…
WiMAX (acronym for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a family of technical standards based on IEEE 802.16 standard that defines the high speed connection through radio waves unlike DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) or other wired technology. It can provide coverage to remote rural areas of several kilometers in radius, it's an adequate response to some rural or inaccessible areas. WiMAX can provide point-to-point (P2P) and point-to-multipoint (PMP) modes. In parallel, it was observed that, unlike the traditional assessment methods for quality, nowadays, current research focuses o…
Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a paradigm for handling delay sensitive services that require ultra-low latency at the access network. With it, computing and communications are performed within one Base Station (BS) site, where the computation resources are in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs) (computer emulators) in the MEC server. MEC and Energy Harvesting (EH) BSs, i.e., BSs equipped with EH equipments, are foreseen as a key towards next-generation mobile networks. In fact, EH systems are expected to decrease the energy drained from the electricity grid and facilitate the deployment o…
Google's Project Loon was launched in 2013 with the aim of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. In the Loon network, balloons travel around the Earth and bring access points to the users who cannot connect directly to the global wired Internet. The signals from the users will be transmitted through the balloon network to the base stations connected to the Internet service provider (ISP) on Earth. The process of transmitting and receiving data consume a certain amount of energy from the balloon, while the energy on balloons cannot be supplied by stable power source or by replaci…
The IEEE 802.22 is a new cognitive radio standard that is aimed at extending wireless outreach to rural areas. Known as wireless regional area networks, and designed based on the not-to-interfere spectrum sharing model, WRANs are channelized and centrally-controlled networks working on the under-utilized UHF/VHF TV bands to establish communication with remote users, so-called customer premises equipment (CPEs). Despite the importance of reliable and interference-free operation in these frequencies, spectrum sensing fusion mechanisms suggested in IEEE 802.22 are rudimentary and fail to satisfy …
