A User-Centric Network Architecture for Sustainable Rural Areas

摘要

Heterogeneous networks offer interesting solutions to problems encountered in user-centric network architecture. Encompassing various communication technologies, they offer great potentials for addressing some of the challenges that ICT based remote services face. In this work, we focus on their deployment in rural areas and developing countries. More specifically, we examine how heterogeneous networks can be used in a user-centric architecture to improve application interactivity, interoperability, and network utilization. Restrictions of each constituent technology cause the architecture to have an upper limit in supporting simultaneous interactive applications. To investigate these limits, and to identify potential enhancements, we study an interactive education model. The considered interactivity, facilitated by heterogeneous networks, is between clients in rural areas and servers in an urban area. The underlying model architecture involves several communication technologies such as WiFi, Ethernet, WiMAX, and UMTS. Several scenarios relevant to this architecture are simulated and analyzed. For each scenario, videoconferencing sessions are initiated with variant number of users. The performance of the architecture in terms of capacity and key QoS parameters such as delay variation, end-to-end delay, and packet loss is evaluated. The results show that for most typical situations, WiFi-WiMAX combinations outperform other integrations.