Low-cost Wireless Network Architecture for

Developing Countries
Yvon Gourhant, Elena Lukashova , Malla Reddy Sama, Sherif Abdel Wahed,
Djamal-Eddine Meddour and Daniel Philip Venmani
Orange Labs, Lannion, France
Emails: {yvon.gourhant, mallareddy.sama, sherif.abdelwahed, djamal.meddour, danielphilip.venmani}@orange.com,
elena.lukashova@eurecom.fr

AbstractThe emergence of Internet access and advanced spots that are out of range of existing sites and increase end-
wireless technologies has its limitations across the globe, i.e. user throughput.
today there exist several rural regions, especially in developing A Spot Cell encompasses a Home e/Node-B(HNB) con-
countries, that do not afford Internet connectivity. In this
paper, we present a design of a cost-effective wireless network nected to a Home Gateway (HGW) which is connected to the
architecture that aims at providing Internet in fix-usage within traditional Node-B (NB)/eNode-B (eNB) through a directive
those countries. We claim that with few design changes to the antenna that increases the signal strength (see Fig. 1).
3GPP architecture, it is possible to extend Internet connectivity
within suburban and rural areas by deploying numerous hotspots
Secondary Link
based on sharing tasks and revenues with local actors. (3G wireless P2P)
Index TermsDeveloping countries, Internet, 3GPP, Small L-GW
Cells (Local Service)

MSC HLR
PCRF OCS
I. I NTRODUCTION Node B Iub
Gs

CS

Gr
I2
G
HGW + Yagi

Gx
The penetration of Internet is nearly at the beginning in
y

Iu-
HNB Antenna
most of the developing countries even if it is increasing day by RNC
GGSN
day in some of these countries; 16% of Africans have access SGSN

Gi
Iub
to the Internet whereas 75% in Europe and 61% in America HGW + Yagi Packet
Antenna Switch PDN Network
according to 2013 Global Internet Usage [1]. We expect that IPSec
Gateway
Service
Global Operator traffic Optional
the arrival of sub-marine cables in developing countries will UE I1 Node B Infopreneurs traffic Services
HNB UE Infopreneurs traffic
bridge this gap. However, building mobile access networks in L-GW with untrusted link HNB-Core-GW
(Local Service) Secondary link
these regions presents radically different challenges than in Primary Link Secure tunnel
(3G wireless P2P)
western countries, considering low ARPU customers [2].
In this paper, we target wireless Internet connectivity in
developing countries. The current way is to deploy 4G e- Fig. 1. Proposed architecture providing 3G connectivity spots. Green colored
Node B or 3G Node B at the same locations than the existing links represent the traffic coming from infopreneurs HNB with a secure tunnel
set up between the HGW and the core network; orange colored links represents
2G sites, but the question of improving the throughput at the the traffic of traditional devices connected to the global operator. In the same
border of cells and extending the broadband coverage beyond vein, it applies to LTE/EPC architecture.
those existing sites is still open.
In order to go faster than with traditional business models, Thus, hotspots of connectivity for fix-usage Internet are
we propose to share passive infrastructure, tasks of marketing provided outside coverage of a traditional NB without adding
and management operations with infopreneurs rather than extra back-haul link since access from traditional NB is used
between Mobile Network Operators. An infopreneur acts as for back-hauling the HNB.
a local virtual access operator: she/he owns and manages The motivation to design a new architecture rather than a
the site, increases the operator customers by bringing more new algorithm is that in the context of emerging countries we
clients within his/her vicinity, taking care of sales, etc. This expect major cost savings from reusing mass-market products.
new business model fits developing countries because it takes Typically, the price of femtocells has critically reduced during
roots on existing agents in charge of recharging prepaid the last months due to the high number of units sold in mature
cards (and/or mobile money account) who may extend their markets. Typically the cost of a femtocell is being now roughly
business. This is also an opportunity for Mobile Network equal to the price of a WiFi Access Point.
Operators (MNO) thanks to cost savings. The counter part Therefore, we propose a new way of integrating femto
is that the site locations will be chosen by infopreneurs. cells into the 3GPP 3G/4G architectures and a new business
In this paper, we propose a design of a cost-effective model based on sharing risks and revenues with infopreneurs.
wireless network architecture that calls for deploying spot cells The related works are presented in section II. Our proposed
in order to extend 3G/4G coverage in the some-what-dense architecture is described in section III. Section IV discusses the

978-1-4799-5350-9/14/$31.00

c 2014 IEEE
practical feasibility of the proposed solution, and performance
evaluations are presented in section V. Finally, section VI
concludes the paper and gives some perspectives.
II. R ELATED W ORKS
There exist several ways to improve the throughput at the
border of cells and to increase coverage beyond existing sites.
Site sharing and/or outsourcing have been widely adopted,
especially in rural areas of developing countries. Active net-
work sharing has been set up by mobile network operators
but mostly in Europe due to the ease of political/regulatory
issues [3]. It has not been adopted in developing countries
because the network sharing models defined in 3GPP standards
[4] do not allow competition at network flow level. In recent
literature ([5], [6]), they have introduced network operator
differentiation along with sharing at the network flow level.
In fact, serious changes are required on the 3GPP architecture
(e.g., impacts on GTP protocol or Node B).
3G/LTE relays ([7], [8]) is a serious option for improving
coverage, especially where wired infrastructures are lacking,
but the cost saving is not enough for targeting ARPU of
developing countries. This is mainly because of the major costs
coming from passive infrastructure (tower or site rent, energy,
civil works). We propose to reuse the infopreneur house and to
share revenues. In that context, current relays implementations
do not fit the requirements of our proposed business model due
to the following reasons: (1) relays are usually under control
of MNO for security issues, but they cant be trusted in our
business model; (2) their location is usually chosen by MNO
in order to optimize coverage [9] and to reduce interferences;
an update of radio planning is required each time a new site is
deployed. Instead of this, spot cells should be plug-and-play
in order to ease deployment and their location will be chosen
by the infopreneurs.
Our business model requires also counting the traffic going
through every spot cells in order to share revenues with
infopreneurs, and consequently to identify each spot cell.
III. A RCHITECTURE D ESCRIPTION
In the 3GPP standardized femtocell architecture ([10], [11]
and [12]), HNB are connected to the mobile core network
by a fixed network access through a HNB Gateway (HNB-
Core-GW). A typical HNB is a residential/entreprise femtocell
with limited coverage range radius (<100m) but also low
power consumption. This architecture is not often applicable
in developing countries because wired infrastructures are not
as largely deployed as in developed economies. We therefore
appeal for extensions of this architecture reusing Home Node
B.
A. Proposed Architecture
The MNO provides a radio local loop to the infopreneur
since it gives him/her access to the radio access spectrum.
But it is still the responsibility of the MNO to take care
of the authentication (of both the infopreneur equipments
and the end-users), accounting, backhaul and interconnection
connectivity, and end-to-end (e2e) security issues.
Spot Cells include outdoor HNB directly connected to
the MNO network through HGW equipped with a 3G/LTE
interface and passive directive antennas in order to get a better
signal strength than simple UE.
Backhaul Connections/Resiliency: a HGW may have
two 3G/LTE wireless point-to-point connections with 2
different nearest NB, one as primary link and other
as secondary link, for resiliency purpose (Fig. 1). No
additional backhaul links is therefore required for the spot
cell (as in the case when it would be needed if a new
traditional NB is added) thanks to the licensed 3G/4G
spectrum provided by the traditional NB acting as the
HGW backhaul connection.
AAA Server: the SIM details (e.g., IMSI) are registered
in the MNO AAA system (Authentication, Authorization
and Accounting). This registration is based on info-
preneur slices shown in Fig. 2. The MNO takes care of
supplying a bunch of SIM cards to infopreneurs, so its
authentication server knows any User Equipment (UE)
as well as the infopreneur HGW. The MNO bills all
the clients and share revenues with infopreneurs. The
HGW authenticates with global operator AAA server.
After successful authentication, the AAA server allocates
the APN address for the HGW. All HNBs connected
to HGW may start SIM authentication process with
AAA server which sends the HNB policies to HGW.
Then the HGW allocates the local IP address for HNB.
The enhanced AAA server detects end-users connected
through a HNB in order to avoid charging traffic twice,
since the architecture leads to a loop inside the core
network.
Add New Users
Change Users Policies
Change User Profile Add New Users
Etc.. Change Users Policies
Change User Profile
Infopreneur_N Etc..
Infopreneur_2
Infopreneur_1
Add New Users Infopreneur_1
Users N1, N2,... Nn
Change Users Policies
Change User Profile Infopreneur_2
Etc.. Users N1, N2,... Nn
Infopreneur_n
Users N1, N2,... Nn
Global Operator
AAA Server Users N1, N2,... Nn
Data Base
SGSN GGSN
Global Operator Core Network
Fig. 2. AAA Server with dedicated API to Infopreneurs.
Global Operator AAA Management API: dedicated
to Infopreneurs: the global operator provides a dedicated
API to infopreneurs in order they can manage their
clients through the AAA server slices as shown in Fig. 2.
Infopreneurs are contact points of clients: they monitor
their usage, re-credit them or remove their account.
 Secure Connections: similarly to [12], the HNB is
connected to a Secure-GW and then to the HNB-Core-
GW. This makes sure that no traffic going to the core
network is malicious. The consequence is that a loop is
created in the core network between the GGSN/P-GW,
the HNB-Core-GW and the SGSN/S-GW.
Global mobility is not supported since no coverage con-
tinuity is guaranteed between small cells, but roaming
between infopreneur sites is considered by the AAA
server.
Bandwidth Management and QoS: Since resources of
MNO Node B are reused for interconnecting infopreneur sites
instead of adding new backhaul microwaves links, Node B
have to deal with both mobile UE directly attached to Node
B and UE attached to fixed HNB owned by infopreneurs. In
addition to this, minimum guaranteed bandwidth is allocated
to infopreneur HGW. This bandwidth allocation takes place
from RNC/S-GW in accordance with its configuration rules
based on APN. The HGW shares this bandwidth between the
HNB connected to it. Fig. 3 shows the bandwidth allocation
for mobile UE and for HGWs (bI1 , bI2 and bI3 ) from primary
Node B, and bandwidth sharing between HNB (I11 , I21 and
I31 ).
bI1 bI2 bIn
I11 I12 I1n I21 I2n I31 I32 I3n
0 1
Total Bandwidth allocated for 3G Node B
Fig. 3. Bandwidth allocation for HGW from Node B and for HNB from
HGW, and space left for traditional mobile UE.
Due to our adopted business model, HGW locations are
defined by infopreneurs whereas traditionally MNO look for
Node B sites and achieve radio resources planning. However,
HGW location is static and the infopreneur gives the HGW
location to the MNO once. When a HGW has successfully
authenticated, the SGSN/S-GW knows the location of the
HGW. Here, we consider that is the threshold for allocating
bandwidth for HGWs. When HGW requests for the extra
resources, if the NB available resources are below cut-off
then the request is accepted and resources are allocated to
the HGW. The allocated resource can be reused if there is
a big distance between the HGWs. The cut-off will vary
according to required bandwidth behind HGW. We consider
that minimum bandwidth is allocated to every HNB (each UE
with minimum QoS bearer) from the HGW it is connected to.
IV. I MPLEMENTATION
In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture,
we set up first implementation based on Orange core network
image1 . It comprises a femto-cell acting as HNB which
1 The Orange France core network image is an experimental network used
by Orange Labs where the equipments and platforms are similar to those in
the operational network. In addition, it contains new features to be integrated
in near future evolutions. Only internal users have access to it.
provides low-cost dedicated 3G coverage of transmit power
10dBm. The Femtocell is connected to an Orange Flybox
acting as a HGW, connected to the traditional cellular network
through a yagi antenna providing 18dBi gain. A dedicated
APN is used to attach the end-users to a dedicated AAA
server connected to the GGSN. SIM based authentication is
used for end-users; SIM details (e.g. IMSI) are stored in the
AAA server database. A FreeRADIUS running on a Linux
computer acts as AAA server. It communicates with a MySQL
database system for storing authentication, authorization and
accounting records using the RADIUS protocol. The Flybox
replicates similar functionalities of the HGW such as NAS
functions, etc. Once the requests for authentication arrive, the
GGSN relays them to the AAA server. The server checks
its database for the SIM details and sends responses. For
testing, we added the profile of a 3G end-user device into
the FreeRADIUS server using the web interface daloRADIUS.
Once the device is authenticated with the AAA server the user
can access Internet.
V. T EST-B ED E VALUATION AND S IMULATION R ESULTS
The evaluation is twofold. First, we measured the overhead
of tunnel encapsulation in realistic conditions, by connecting
NB BW
the Spot Cell implementation to the HSPA commercial net-
work. Second, since we do not control the network conditions
UE6 UE3 UE2 UE1 there, we evaluated the gains at radio level in the context of
LTE2 using MATLAB.
A. Test-bed Results
A tapping Ethernet switch was used to capture the IP traffic
traveling between HNB and HNB-Core-GW in both directions.
Furthermore, Wireshark software was used to analyze IP traffic
to observe encapsulation overheads. Fig. 4 depicts IP backhaul
requirements [13] for voice calls where each 3G voice call
requires around 64 Kbps. Note that both upload and download
(shown by filters) consume same traffic rate of 32 Kbps for
each call which is a characteristic of voice.
Fig. 4. 3G voice (1, 2, 3, and 4 simultaneous calls) on IP backhaul
Fig. 5 illustrates the IP backhaul requirements of data
service where user application layer throughput varies from
40 Kbps to 90 Kbps. Note that an overhead of around 35%
2 LTE was choose for giving new perspectives such as interference mitiga-
tion.
were observed in traffic travelling between HNB and HNB- be transferred during 1ms. The mapping procedure for giving
GW. This overhead is due to 3G protocols overhead in addition BLER can be represented as following:
to IPsec encapsulation overhead.
SIN R CQI M CS T BS Index T BS (1)
With this background, throughput per sub-carrier in 1 sec-
ond can be seen as

T hroughput = (1 BLER) T BS 1000 (bps) (2)

where (1 BLER) defines the probability of successful
package receiving, T BS is transport block size.
Received SINR per subscriber j can be estimated from the
following equation:
Fig. 5. 3G data user throughput impact on IP backhaul: 40 KBps 90
KBps
Prec j
SIN Rj = (3)
N0 . 4f + Iintra + Iinter
As expected the download stream is significantly higher than
upload stream due to traffic usage behaviour. For instance, for Where Prec j is the received power by subscriber j, N0 is
HNB users to enjoy aggregated application user rate of 40 the power noise density, 4f is sub-carrier spacing, Iintra and
KBps and 90 KBps, an IP backhaul rate of 0.5 Mbps and 1.2 Iinter are intra-cell and inter-cell interference respectively.
Mbps are required, respectively. In the scope of the analysis we consider a cell cluster
In summary and based on observations above, an IP back- divided into two regions: inner and outer. The traditional
haul requirements of 1.6 Mbps is required to serve 4 voice macro e-Node B is placed in the center of the cluster and
users and 4 data users (256 Kbps each). This requirement may the He-Node Bs are located within the inner region of the
be achieved by the serving NB when the CQI (Channel Quality cluster (Fig. 6).
Indicator) measured by the mobile phone exceeds or equals
to 16 given than RNC has enough capacity. These results are e-Node B
based on CQI to IP rate mapping provided by Agilent. Finally, k Ba ck
l lin haul
link
au
it is worth mentioning that the SMS and USSD use-cases were c kh
Ba

Dir
ec
validated to make sure that core loop issue does not affect
tL
ink
MUE
customer experience.
nk s
Li ces
c
A

B. LTE Radio-level downlink performance analysis Inner region of the SUE

SUE cell He-Node B
One of the fundamental principles of air interface design He-Node B (2)
Outer region
in LTE networks is Link Adaptation: e-Node B is capable (1) of the cell

of adjusting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) to

the downlink channel conditions, taking into account Signal-
to- Noise Ratio (SINR) and receiver characteristics. As a part
of UE feedback transmitted to e-Node B on uplink, CQI is
derived from Reference Signal Received Quality (RSRQ) and
corresponds to the MCS that ensures Block Error Rate (BLER)
not greater than 101 . While operating in poor channel con-
ditions, system uses low modulation scheme and coding rate.
Coding rate is defined as a ratio between useful bits and overall
amount of bits transmitted into channel. With the improvement
of the radio channel conditions, e-Node B will first raise the
Fig. 6. Evaluation topology
Before moving further, the two terms have to be introduced:
Macro Cell User Equipment (MUE) mobile device
attached and served by the traditional e-Node B on direct
link (DL). Notice that the He-Node B is seen by the
traditional e-Node B as MUE but is served on wireless
backhaul link (BL).
Small Cell User Equipment (SUE) mobile device at-

coding rate step by step, allowing to increase the amount
of transmitted information without changing the modulation
order, and then when maximum of coding rate is achieved,
the modulation order will be switch to the higher [14]. In its
turn, MCS defines Transport Block Size Index (TBS Index),
and for particular number of Physical Radio Blocks (PRB)
TBS itself [15]. Using LTE Transmission Mode 1 (SISO), one
transport block can be transmitted during one Transmit Time
Interval (TTI) of 1ms, and TBS defines how many bits can
tached and served by the He-Node B on access link (AL).
According to the proposed architecture, there are several
ways for macro e-Node B to distinguish the Random Access
Preamble message from He-Node B and MUE, and one
of them is DoA (Direction of Arrival). Each small cell is
divided into inner and outer region as well following the same
principle as the macro cell. Small cells work on Frequency
Division Duplex (FDD) mode. The UE can be served by at
most one e-Node B/He-Node B.
 TABLE I
As a main metric of physical layer down-link performance S IMULATION PARAMETERS .
evaluation end-user throughput was chosen. For two-hop links
e2e throughput is defined as a minimum throughput between Parameters Values
the access and back-haul link [16]. Global parameters
Deployment Outdoor
One of the most challenging parts of the proposed solution
Access Open Access
is to tackle the co-tier and cross-tier interference which lead For HetNets in outdoor rural
to significant degradation of the user throughput. In this work Pathloss model environment recommended by
we investigate the FFR (Fractional Frequency Reuse) scheme 3GPP in [16]
System Bandwidth 5MHz
in order to mitigate both types of interferences. The entire Spacing Difference 15 kHz
system bandwidth of the macro e-Node B is statically divided Power Noise Density -174 dBm/Hz
into five sub-bands: the sub-band A is dedicated to the inner BER 101
region of macro-cell, sub-band B is assigned to the SUEs in the e-Node B
inner region of small cells, and the rest of spectrum resources e-Node B Total Transmit
43 dBm
Power
are equally split between the outer regions of the small cells Averaged e-Node B Antenna
with frequency reuse factor 3 (C1, C2 and C3). The frequency 10 dBm
Gain3
pattern is depicted in the Fig. 7. Losses 7 dBm
He-Node B
He-Node B Maximum
10 dBm
Inner region
Outer region of macrocell Transmit Power
of macrocell
Averaged He-Node B Trans-
3 dBm
mit Antenna Gain
He-Node B Receive Anten-
A B C1 C2 C3 21 dBi
na Gain
Losses 3dBm
MUE1,center MUE2,center ... MUEn,center SUE1,center SUE2,center ... SUEn,center SUE1,boarder SUE2,boarder ... SUEn,boarder

from the backhaul link. The simulation baseline parameters

Fig. 7. Frequency division pattern correspond to [16] and are listed in Table I.
At this point we predefine some spectrum resources divi- C. Single user throughput comparison and coverage extension
sion: assuming 5MHz (25 PRB) of available system band-
We measured at what distance from Macro e-Node B
width, the A sub-band is represented by 2 MHz (10 PRB) and
is it reasonable to deploy He-Node B to provide sufficient
each He-Node B will have B+C1, B+C2 or B+C3 equal to 1
throughput and coverage extension. As an input for BLER
MHz (5 PBR) for the backhaul connection; 1 PRB is a resource
prediction, link level simulations and the AWGN channel
unit assigned to each UE. The frequency division pattern fully
performance curves obtained in [17] for all MCS of LTE are
cancels the cross-tier interference between MUEs and SUEs,
used.
since they are allocated orthogonal sets of subcarriers. The
resource allocation for the backhaul link is depicted in Fig. 8.

1MHz

e-Node B
1MHz
1MHz

He-Node B

Fig. 9. Throughput on direct, backhaul and access links.

Fig. 9 depicts absolute values of MUE and e2e SUE

throughputs (assuming 1MHz of bandwidth or 5PRB are
dedicated to 1 UE in 1ms) as the length of backhaul and
Fig. 8. spectrum allocation to He-NodeB on the e-Node-B access link varies from 4 to 9km and from 100m to 1 km
respectively. In this scenario interference impact is neglected.
In the scope of this work it is assumed that the He-Node B As it was mention above, e2e throughput is restricted to the
broadcasts using the same amount of the PRBs which it gets minimum between throughputs on backhaul and access links.
Due to the high gain of yagi antenna mounted on He-Node
B, the bottleneck shifts to the access link: the backhaul link
throughput remains at maximum on the distances up to 10 km.
On the other hand, placing He-Node B in a relatively short
distances from the Macro e-Node B does not bring significant
benefits, due to the fact that e2e SUE throughput dramatically
decreases even on relatively short distances from the serving
He-Node B. Although absolute e2e SUE throughput does not
depend on the distance between Macro e-Node B and He-Node
B, it is reasonable to deploy He-Node B with the backhaul link
length greater than 7 km, what provides up 75% benefits in
comparison with MUE throughput, according to the Fig. 10.
Fig. 10. Ratio between e2e SUE and MUE user throughput.
As one can see from Fig. 10, at first 500 meters SUE
throughput remains constant due the fact that high SINR
(higher than 20 dB) allows using the highest modulation
scheme; at the same time MUE throughput is decreasing
fast, thus, the overall ratio is increasing. After this distance
throughput of SUE decreases fast, and the ratio falls down
dramatically, but at the back-haul length greater than 7 km
is still beneficial. One of the further improvements in the
proposed solution to increase the e2e SUE throughput is to
raise He-Node B Maximum Transmit Power up to 15dB,
what will significantly reduce the region where the ratio is
decreasing.
VI. C ONCLUSION AND P ERSPECTIVES
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Internet-for-all does
not cling to any new technological advancement that needs
a brain-teasing hardcore software development building from
scratch, but a novel paradigm that requires immediate attention
and quick action by compounding the existing network struc-
ture, upgrading the 3GPP existing infrastructure, trading new
services, and provisioning customers to high speed Internet.
Through our proposed solution, we bring the idea to roll-out
outdoor femto-cells in rural and suburban areas, with low cost
investments. It consists in creating new spots of broadband
connectivity as a preliminary step before deploying traditional
macro-NB with larger coverage.
In terms of perspectives, this architecture is opening the
way to more research studies. On the one hand, interference
management mechanisms that exist in current products can
be improved to better fit our use case even if the problem of
hidden/exposed nodes cant be solved without modifying end-
user devices. New heuristics implemented in He-Node Bs are
expected. On the other hand, when the number of He-Node
Bs increases in the same area, they induce an overload of the
traditional cellular network supporting them, as well as the
core network due to the loop. We need to define new wireless
back-hauling mechanisms for a large number of small cells.
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