Tetherless communication

This is what our research group at the University of Waterloo is working on, under the supervision of Prof. Srinivasan Keshav. The goal of tetherless communication for rural areas is to provide low cost per bit communication, even to areas that do not have Internet connectivity. Dial-up is slow and flaky, VSAT terminals are expensive, and wireless meshes require power supply at mesh towers plus continous monitoring and failure rectification. We propose to use mechanical backhauls like buses and vans to carry data to and fro, between disconnected rural areas and cities with Internet connectivity.

Buses and vans regularly run to bring retail supplies to villages, and to provide a basic transport infrastructure. We plan to mount on these buses a soekeris box, which is nothing but a small linux computer with a hard disk, fitted with a WiFi access point. Whenever the bus stops next to a village Internet kiosk, the computers in the kiosk will connect with the soekeris box and upload or download data. The bus will eventually move to a city and offload all its data into the Internet through gateways in a manner similar to how the data upload and download works in villages.

So far, we have implemented a Java based software framework called Opportunistic Connection Management Protocol (OCMP) which supports such a kind of disconnected operation. We are closely working with eGovServices towards understanding the appropriate scenarios for deployment of OCMP. We have also proposed extensions to the framework to take care of location management in the case of disconnections, and handle security using Identity Based Cryptography. We are also trying to integrate OCMP with DTN to take care of multiple levels of disconnections.

OCMP is further suitable for multi-NIC communication, like utilizing the cellular network and WiFi collectively. This is likely to find use in signalling routing or status updates or important feedback information on the cellular channel which is fairly ubiquitous in coverage even in the rural areas, and to use the WiFi based mechanical backhaul for large data transfer in a delay tolerant manner.

All of us are quite exicted about this project. Amazingly, the eGovServices folks do transactions in village Internet koisks on electricity bills, mutual funds, infrastructure bonds, birth and death certificates, and other applications. And so far they have successfully handled transactions of over 8 crores since they came into operation!