At A Glance: TUCAN3G

Wireless technologies for isolated

rural communities in developing
countries based on cellular 3G
femtocell deployments






Project Coordinator
Josep Vidal
Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Tel: +34 934016457
Email: josep.vidal@upc.edu
Website: http://www.ict-tucan3g.eu

Partners: Universitat Politcnica de
Catalunya (UPC-Spain), Universidad
Rey J uan Carlos (URJ C-Spain),
Universidad Catlica del Per (PUCP-
Per), Universidad de Cauca (UCAU-
Colombia), Fondo de Inversin en
Telecomunicaciones (FITEL-Per),
IP.Access (IPA-UK), Telefnica del Per
(TdP-Per), Fundacin EHAS (Spain),
Telefnica Internacional Wholesale
Services (TIWS-Spain), Centro Regional
de Productividad del Cauca (CREP-
Colombia), Knowledge and Innovation
Consultants (KINNO-Greece)
Duration: 2, 2013 7, 2015
Funding scheme: STREP
Total Cost: 1,68M
EC Contribution: 1,01M

Contract Num.: FP7-ICT-2011-9-601102



Wireless technologies for rural communities
in developing countries based on cellular 3G
femtocell deployments
The project aims at designing a
technologically feasible and yet economically
sustainable solution for the progressive
introduction of voice and broadband data
services in isolated rural communities of
developing countries, using commercial
cellular terminals, 3G femtocells (and its
possible evolution to 4G) and heterogeneous
backhauling (WiLD-WiMAX-VSAT)

Main Objectives
Recent years have witnessed a massive penetration of
cellular telephony in developing countries. However, isolated
rural areas (inhabited by low-income population) have
generally been disregarded because
classical access and backhaul
technologies do not assure the return
on investment. As communication is
crucial in human development, finding
innovative solutions to connect these
areas is an utmost necessity.
TUCAN3G proposes to study, from the
twofold technological and socio-
economical perspectives, the
progressive introduction of mobile
telephony and data services in isolated
rural areas of developing countries, by
taking advantage of new wireless
technologies for the access network
(based on 3G femtocells, and its
evolution to 4G) in outdoor scenarios,
as well as WiLD (WiFi for Long
Distances) WiMAX - VSAT
heterogeneous backhauling. Those
promise to be key in the development of
inexpensive, sustainable, energy efficient, self-organized
and long-term self-sufficient solutions that result in a
profitable business case. The project also proposes the
installation of a demonstration platform in the Peruvian
jungle that will enable the verification of business model
hypothesis and results, and serve as a general showcase.
In rural areas of
developing
countries, voice
and Internet
access must
converge with the
help of cellular
technologies, but
three difficulties
need to be
solved:
1. Backhaul
capacity
2. Cost of base
stations
3. Business
models adapted
to people with
lowest incomes
T U C A N 3 G
FP7 ICT Objective 10.3 International
partnership building and support to
dialogues


Technical Approach
The design of a rural wireless access network is
focused on providing voice and data services at a
low cost, allowing an easy and progressive
network upgrade as traffic demand increases.
Little human intervention and reduced energy
consumption are required to fit the constraints of
the rural scenario.
To address these challenges TUCAN3G proposes
a scenario where the wireless access network
consists of distributing multiple UMTS/HSPA (3G)
femtocells (HNB) with a wireless backhaul over
given rural areas. On each of these areas, a
gateway will be in charge of linking the transport
and access network segments, along to properly
design the
transmissions
over the
wireless
backhaul, which
are performed
with a different
Radio Access
Technology
(RAT), like WiFi
or WiMAX.
Provided a
reliable
transport
network,
femtocells
guarantee all
the requirements of rural communications
deployments: being inexpensive, sustainable,
energy efficient, self-organized and long-term self-
sufficient.
Some technical challenges to be faced are:
distributed non-supervised methods for energy
consumption optimization under service
constraints; network monitoring; self-organising
carrier selection and interference management;
efficient interoperability between access and
transport network; and core-network data-plane
offloading when the traffic in the access network
grows.
Key Issues
The design of a technologically feasible and yet
economically sustainable solution is addressed in
TUCAN3G in three parallel ways:
a) J ointly designing the access and transport
network under criteria of low energy consumption
and low maintenance/installation cost, while still
fitting service level requirements.
b) Developing a demonstration platform
supporting the project technical developments and
being a showcase for international cooperation
agencies, cellular telephony operators and rural
communications investment funds.
c) Defining a viable business model that
guarantees successful and generalized
deployments in a mid-term.
Expected Impact
The project aims to develop a technical solution
with an actual (social) impact on rural / low
income communities, by addressing low cost
technologies that will reduce the digital divide in a
sustainable yet economically viable way.
In addition to that, the international dimension of
EU ICT programme and the comparative
advantage of European initiatives are guaranteed
in three respects:
1. The
participation in
the project of
ip.access, one of
the leader
vendors in the
femtocell market,
and Telefonica,
the leader among
operators in
providing wireless
and satellite
services in Latin
America, will help
boosting the
business on the rural sector and improve the
social perception of both these companies and the
EU initiatives.
2. TUCAN3G will promote the relevant results in
EU-led 3GPP standards (not only on 3G but also
providing guidelines for system evolution paths
towards 4G technologies), for those innovations
steaming from the rural scenario restrictions, not
usually well defended (if at all) in standardization
forums.
3. Technology improvement is supported by
results and expertise generated in previous EC
funded projects (EHAS and ALIS, and 7th FP
project FREEDOM). Bringing those concepts to
the rural outdoor scenario envisioned in
TUCAN3G is a non-straightforward task, and
implies an opportunity towards EU leadership on
R&D in these regions.
Finally, the construction of a demonstration
platform in WP6, that will be connected to the
commercial wireless network of Telefonica del
Peru, will become a showcase for international
dissemination of EU activities as well as its
generalization to other developing countries.
TUCAN3G
March 2013