Remote and Rural Connectivity: Infrastructure and Resource Sharing Principles

Abstract

As mobile networks (MNs) are advancing towards meeting mobile user requirements, the rural-urban divide still remains a major challenge. While areas within the urban space (metropolitan mobile space) are being developed, i.e., small Base Stations (BSs) empowered with computing capabilities are deployed to improve the delivery of user requirements, rural areas are left behind. Due to challenges of low population density, low income, difficult terrain, nonexistent infrastructure, and 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 this issue, this paper proposes a new BS deployment and resource management method for remote and rural areas. Here, two MN operators share their resources towards the procurement and deployment of green energy-powered BSs equipped with computing capabilities. Then, the network infrastructure is shared between the mobile operators, with the main goal of enabling energy-efficient infrastructure sharing, i.e., BS and its colocated computing platform. Using this resource management strategy in rural communication sites guarantees a quality of service (QoS) comparable to that of urban communication sites. The performance evaluation conducted through simulations validates our analysis as the prediction variations observed show greater accuracy between the harvested energy and the traffic load. Also, the energy savings decrease as the number of mobile users (50 users in our case) connected to the remote site increases. Lastly, the proposed algorithm achieves 51% energy savings when compared with the 43% obtained by our benchmark algorithm. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance over the benchmark algorithm as it uses foresighted optimization where the harvested energy and the expected load are predicted over a given short-term horizon.