A Key 6G Challenge and Opportunity—Connecting the Base of the Pyramid: A Survey on Rural Connectivity

By Elias Yaacoub, Mohamed-Slim Alouini. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2020

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Providing connectivity to around half of the world population living in rural or underprivileged areas is a tremendous challenge, but, at the same time, a unique opportunity. Access to the Internet would provide the population living in these areas a possibility to progress on the educational, health, environment, and business levels. In this article, a survey of technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas, which can help address this challenge, is provided. Although access/fronthaul and backhaul techniques are discussed in this article, it is noted that the major limitation for providing connectivity to rural and underprivileged areas is the cost of backhaul deployment. In addition, energy requirements and cost-efficiency of the studied technologies are analyzed. In fact, the challenges faced for deploying an electricity network, as a prerequisite for deploying communication networks, are huge in these areas, and they are granted an important share of the discussions in this article. Furthermore, typical application scenarios in rural areas are discussed, and several country-specific use cases are surveyed. The main initiatives by key international players aiming to provide rural connectivity are also described. Moreover, directions for the future evolution of rural connectivity are outlined in this article. Although there is no single solution that can solve all rural connectivity problems, building gradually on the current achievements in order to reach ubiquitous connectivity, while taking into account the particularities of each region and tailoring the solution accordingly, seems to be the most suitable path to follow.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28863420e771168489ff03307737aeb25c296636

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Citations in the corpus

Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “For instance, Human-Centric Services (HCS) are expected to bank on 3CLS services to facilitate efﬁcient communication and real-time processing of a large number of data streams gathered through sensors that are centered around humans [57], [58].”
Non-Terrestrial Networks in the 6G Era: Challenges and Opportunities (2019, background): “Additionally, there currently exist several case studies of NTN deployments in different countries, in addition to efforts by international foundations and initiatives [2].”
Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “Other surveys, tutorials, and short review articles with little relevance to this survey can be found in [5], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26],”