Cell-Share: Opportunistic Use of Cellular Uplink to Augment Rural WiFi Mesh Networks

The Internet has revolutionized communication, education, commerce and information access for its users worldwide. Unfortunately, the lack of copper/fiber infrastructure in the rural areas of the developing world has prevented a large majority of the human population from reaping the benefits of the Internet. While the number of mobile subscribers in the developing world has more than quadrupled in the last five years, the adoption of the Internet has shown a slow growth pattern. Recently, there has been a growing interest in providing Internet access to rural areas by means of inexpensive long distance WiFi mesh networks. However, the expensive Internet uplink and the difficulty in troubleshooting of WiFi mesh networks has hindered their large scale deployment. In this paper, we propose Cell-Share an architecture that leverages the explosive growth in cellular network penetration in the developing world to provide rural WiFi mesh networks with an on-demand scalable Internet uplink and troubleshooting back-channel using a collaborative mobile phone framework. We implement Cell-Share on Windows Mobile and Android platforms to demonstrate the feasibility of using the infrastructure of cellular data networks to provide a back-channel for network troubleshooting as well as capacity enhancement for rural mesh networks.