Rural Broadband Access via Clustered Collaborative Communication

Broadband penetration in rural areas of the developing countries is significantly low. The unique challenges in enabling rural connectivity are sparsity of population locations and modest income of the villagers, which induce low return on investment to the conventional cellular network providers. In this paper, we propose a novel cluster-based network architecture and protocols for efficient rural broadband coverage which requires minimal infrastructure setup by the service provider. Multiple customer premise equipments CPEs in a village form clusters and transmit collaboratively over unused television bands to the base station. A two-tier uplink access protocol is proposed and its performance in terms of network throughput and energy efficiency are obtained analytically. The cluster size is optimized to maximize the uplink network throughput and energy-efficiency. A distributed clustering algorithm is proposed for the CPEs to form clusters, while channels are allocated to the clusters using the proposed channel allocation algorithm to minimize inter-cluster interference. Via network simulation studies we demonstrate that the proposed architecture can be cost-effective and energy-efficient, while being scalable at the same time.