COMM

Technology alone, however innovative or even "cheap" is not the solution to poverty, illiteracy, infrastructural inadequacies and the myriads of ills of those below the poverty line in the third world. The ability to utilize technological advances to ...

WiFi has been promoted as an affordable technology that can provide broadband Internet connectivity to poor and sparsely populated regions. A growing number of deployments, some of substantial scale, are making use of WiFi to extend connectivity into ...

FoneAstra is a low-cost, programmable device that extends capabilities of mobile phones. We show how our device extends the functionality of non-programmable, low-tier mobile phones that are most prevalent amongst people from low-income groups in ...

Tracking attendance is a necessity in a variety of contexts in the developing world, encompassing health programs, schools, government offices, and a litany of other milieux. While electronic attendance tracking systems exist and perform their core ...

In this paper we address the problem of providing data connection to the periphery of the health system by presenting Smart Connect. Smart Connect is a custom device that uses the cell phone network to provide limited data connectivity between a rural ...

Several researchers have proposed the use of transient communication opportunities, that is, opportunistic communication, to reduce the cost of rural communication. We propose some design principles for robust opportunistic communication drawing from ...

There have been a number of rural wireless networks providing Internet access over the last decade but little is known about how the Internet is being used, how these networks perform and whether they follow similar trends when compared with Internet ...

While many projects aim to provide network access to the developing world or improve existing network access, relatively little data exists regarding the behavior of traffic in these environments, especially in regards to the characteristics of traffic ...

Broadband Internet access is increasingly being looked at as the new utility, in the same way as water supply and electricity networks. Broadband networks are also being viewed as infrastruc-tural assets, such has roads or highways, because of the ...

Mobile phones have emerged as truly pervasive and affordable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform in the last decade. Large penetration of cellular networks and availability of advanced hardware platforms have inspired multiple ...

We argue that large scale user-driven community networks are becoming viable in areas without access to telecommunication services due to lack of commercial interest. We discuss the design of a key component supporting this claim: a high-performance, ...

Wireless sensor networks allow unprecedented abilities to observe and understand large-scale, real-world phenomena at a fine spatial-temporal resolution. Their application in Developing Countries is even more interesting: they can help solve problems ...

With the advent of mobile revolution, the emerging mobile technologies can support a broad range of learning activities on a variety of mobile devices, a concept referred to as mobile learning. The combination of wireless communication technology and ...

Cellular communications, including handsets and base stations, have become ubiquitous technologies throughout the developing and developed world. Roughly three billion users spend large portions of their income on these basic communications [1]. However,...

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can be considered as hybrid between wireless infrastructure (WLAN) and ad-hoc networks (MANET), with mesh points providing flexibility in building & expanding the network, allowing automatic discovery of neighboring nodes, ...

We describe the design and implementation of an adhoc routing protocol that allows users to transmit their data in poorly-connected areas. This protocol is based on the following observation: while the wireless communication infrastructure (WiFi or ...