Publication

Abstract : In many developing nations such as India the majority of the country's population lives in rural areas. The main challenge of the twenty first century is to enable connectivity in rural areas. Rural Connectivity enables residents to get access to health care services, medical facilities, education services, etc., through the internet. Use of wireless backhaul technologies has the potential to speed up the process of providing connectivity with reasonable bandwidth and optimum coverage. This paper studies all the existing wireless technologies, such as WiMAX, Long range Wi-Fi, Cognitive Radio, LTE and 2G/3G, with respect to their performance in cost, transmission range, vendor support, data rate, bandwidth requirement, latency and spectrum licensing expense. A utility function is evaluated based on these parameters and thereby, a low cost technology for internet access is proposed for providing affordable rural connectivity.