A Key 6G Challenge and Opportunity - Connecting the Base of the Pyramid:
A Survey on Rural Connectivity
Abstract
Providing connectivity to around half of the world population living in
rural or underprivileged areas is a tremendous challenge, but also 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 paper, a survey of
technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas, and that can
help address this challenge, is provided. Although access/fronthaul and
backhaul techniques are discussed in the paper, 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 paper. 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
future evolution of rural connectivity are outlined in the paper.
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.