Some interesting articles from IEEE Communications Magazine

I found interesting articles on IEEE Communications Magazine, January 2007, Vol.45, No.1
1.Connectivity in emerging regions: need for improved technology and business models. By Rahul Tongia, Carnegie Mellon University.
"The digital devide is pressing challenge for both technology and policy professionals. Connectivity is one aspect of the devide, albeit an important one. Availability and affordability remain important issues but these depend on not only technology choices but also business and regulatory models."

2.Experiences in using WiFi for rural Internet in India. by Bhaskaran Raman and Kameswari Chebrolu, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
"Acess to communication can play pivotal role in the socio-economic development of rural regions in the third world. For affordability, the choice of technology to achieve this is a significant factor. The authors have choosen IEEE 802.11 as a cost effective technology to provide rural connectivity in the context of two projects."


3.WiFiRe: Rural area broadband access using the WiFi PHY and a multisector TDD MAC. by Krishna Paul (Intel), Anitha Varghese (General Motors Research), Anurag Kumar (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore), Sridhar Iyer (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay), and Bhaskar Ramamurthi (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras).
"The needs of India rural telecom, and the economics of currently available broadband access technologies, motivate a new system for rural broadband access, which the authors call WiFiRe (WiFi Rural Extension). The system leverages the widely available and highly cost reduced, WiFi chipset. However, they retain only the PHY from these chipsets and propose a single-channel, multisector, TDD MAC using directional antennas."


4.Remote Locations Coverage Analysis with Wireless Mesh Networks Based on IEEE 802.16 Standard. By Roberto Hincapie and Javier Sierra (Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana), and Roberto Bustamante (Universidad de los Andes).
"The authors analyze the wireless coverage problem of remote regions with low user density and propagation problem due to irregular terrain and high tree density. The use of a wirelss mesh network is proposed as a solution."


5.Potential of CDMA450 for rural network connectivity. By Sergiu Nedevschi, Sonesh Surana, Bowei Du, Rabin Patra, Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley), and Victor Stan (Zapp Telemobil).
"The authors evaluate CDMA450 as a potential solution for rural data and voice connectivity. They analyze the main stength of CDMA450 and some of the potential limitations for rural coverage, both from technical and economic standpoint."

6.The Ad-Hoc Return Channel: a Low cost solution for Brazilian Interactive Digital TV. by Miguel Elias M. Campista, Igor M. Moraes, Pedro Miguel Esposito, Aurelio Amodei Jr., Daniel de O. Cunha, Luis Henrique M.K. Costa, and Otto Carlos M.B. Duarte (Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro).
"The upcoming terrestrial digital television technology brings a new class of services to traditional TV sets. A set top box may, for example, access the Internet and send email. The interactive return channel makes these new services possible. The authors analyze the viability of a wireless ad hoc network to implement the return channel.

7.BusinessFinder: Harnessing presence to enable live yellow pages for small, medium, and micro mobile business. by Dipanjan Chakraborty, Koustuv Dasgupta, Sumit Mittal, Archan Misra (IBM Research), Anuj Gupta (IBM Software), Eileen Newmark (IBM systems and technology), and Christopher L. Oberle (IBM global services).
"The authors present BusinessFinder, a service that leverages the underlying cellular presence subtrate to provide efficient, on-demand, context aware matching of customer request to nomadic micro businesses as well as small and medium businesses having a mobile workforce.