Wireless Local Loop at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Xia Gao, Xiaohong Quan, Ravi Jain, Toshiro Kawahara, Ged Powell
DoCoMo Communications Lab USA
Abstract— Most development of cellular communications
technology has been focused on providing services to the
wealthiest 20% of the world’s population – the top of the
economic pyramid. We discuss the motivation for serving the
Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), loosely defined as the 4 billion
people earning less that US$2000/year. We consider the design
requirements for a rural wireless telecommunications system for
the BoP, and how they differ from traditional cellular system and
WLL requirements. We discuss alternative technologies and
architectures for meeting these requirements, ranging from
satellite to WLAN systems. We then present our initial link
analysis showing that cellular systems based on WCDMA or
OFDM meet the requirements with small modifications. We
end with some discussion of open problems and further work.
I. INTRODUCTION
Most development of cellular communications technology,
and indeed of most consumer technology, has been aimed at
the wealthiest 20% of the world’s population – the top of the
economic pyramid. Recently there has been discussion that
providing service to the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) is not
only socially and morally worthwhile, but can in fact be done
profitably [6]. The BoP is defined as the two thirds of the
world’s population today (about 4 billion people) that earns
less than US$2000 per year (See Fig. 1). These poor people
are mostly in developing countries, and mostly in rural areas.
In this paper we consider technologies for providing
communications services to the BoP. Since this is slightly
outside the usual stream of research in wireless
communications technology, we first discuss the background
and motivation in some detail.
Purchasing power parity
(in USD) > $20,000
100
$2,000-20,000 2,000
<$2,000 4,000
Population (in millions)
Figure 1: Economic Pyramid for the World Population [6]
The availability of communications to the BoP is not a
panacea for the difficult and complex problems of poverty, but
it can help break the cycle of stagnant development, or even
deterioration, that persists. Previous pilot projects and
deployments have shown that the communications for the BoP
is not a luxury but a vital need. The rural poor use
communications to discover the price that their agricultural
produce sells for in the city, thus increasing their bargaining
power over middlemen; to obtain lower prices for poultry
feed; to obtain weather information; to report or to be alerted
of disease epidemics in crops, livestock or humans; to receive
money transfers from relatives in the city or abroad; and many
other economically important uses [8].
However, the BoP is very poorly connected; the average
penetration of telephone or Internet services can be up to two
WCNC 2004 / IEEE Communications Society
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:03 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
orders of magnitude lower in, say, rural India or Zimbabwe
than in the US. When one considers that developing countries
themselves have an internal pyramid, the gap is even larger.
There is clearly an important and widespread need that exists.
Obviously this need has not been fulfilled because it is
perceived there is no commercial incentive to do so: the poor
by definition have no disposable income. However,
communications is not a luxury item, and the poor often pay
more per unit for essential goods and services (water, rice,
medication) than the rich [6]. Also, while the purchasing
power of individuals is low, the aggregate power at the BoP is
immense. Thus many approaches to providing service use a
shared use model, where a service or good that would
typically be provided to an individual, e.g. credit or a cell
phone, is time-shared by a group [7].
Meanwhile, from the point of view of a service or equipment
provider, traditional “top-of-the pyramid” markets for cellular
service are becoming saturated, with penetration approaching
80% in some countries. The competition in the traditional
markets is intense, necessitating large marketing and R&D
expenditures, and the cost of serving these markets is high.
The potential for rapid growth by serving the BoP is beginning
to be recognized by multinationals [9].
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. There have
been several projects and deployments aimed at providing
BoP communications services; we summarize some of them in
section 2. Most of them have used existing technology,
sometimes with minor modifications. In contrast, we consider
what trade-offs could be exploited if technology was
developed specifically for serving the BoP. An important goal
in developing solutions for the BoP remains lowering the total
cost dramatically. In section 3 we then look specifically at
communications technology, in particular, the possibility of
using WCDMA or OFDM at the lowest layers, to see if the
requirements can be met. In section 4 we discuss new
research or design issues exposed by the previous analysis and
finally in section 5 we end with brief conclusions.
II. EXISTING SOLUTIONS AND REQUIREMENTS
A. Existing BoP projects
There have been several pilot projects and deployments aimed
at BoP communications [7,8,14]. We briefly describe two
cases as examples.
GrameenTelecom (GTC) is a very successful wireless
operator dedicated to providing telecommunication services to
100 million rural inhabitants in 68000 villages in Bangladesh,
a country where the number of phone lines per capita is among
the lowest in the world. GTC has a strategic partnership with
local banks that provide loans to, and collect payment from,
village phone operators (VP). Each VP runs its own public call
office in a village and derives its profit from the difference
between the air time charges paid by villagers and the billing
amount from GTC. The shared-access business model is
459 0-7803-8344-3/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
proved to be profitable and on average each VP generates $93
revenue per month, twice that of urban mobile phones. In
2001 GTC’s revenue reached $5.6 million with approximate
5000 VPs [7].
The SARI (Sustainable Access in Rural India) project [8] was
initiated by Harvard and MIT in early 2001 and then was
officially launched on November 2001 and managed by n-
Logue Communications, India. SARI set up kiosks in every
village providing telephone, Internet and other stand-alone
computer services to villagers. Self-employed local Power
entrepreneurs run kiosk in a manner similar to GTC. It is
predicted that number of kiosks will jump to 500 after 3 years’
deployment and the total revenue will reach $380 thousand.
B. Requirements
We carried out a survey of pioneer BoP deployments and
studies, and the most salient features of BoP are summarized
below.
• Demand is highly sensitive to price. Most of the people in
these rural markets have a disposable income of under $2 per
day. Therefore, low cost will be a crucial factor determining
local demand and the service scale.
• Both physical and institutional infrastructure may not be
available. Electricity, for example, is often not easily or
affordably available; a mobile station powered by an
electricity-generating bicycle pedaled by a local villager has only raises cost but limits system coverage and total capacity.
ever been used [13].
• Shared-access model can be profitable. Studies have also
shown that people are willing to spend 1-2% of their income
on telecommunications at all income scales. So even though a
single rural village cannot afford the terminal and service
alone, sharing access among a large number of people of a
village can still be profitable.
• The user population often has low literacy and many
languages or dialects may coexist within the serving area.
• The service has large coverage area and low traffic
density. Because of the less-clustered dwelling pattern and the in terms of one-time installation cost and recurrent usage and
shared-access business model, desired technologies should
support a small number of connections in a vast area.
With these limitations in mind, our goal is to look for new
wireless local loop (WLL) technologies that can cost-
effectively serve fewer connections in a vast area. The
scenario we thus consider in this paper is to support at most
200 connections in an area with 50 km radius. The driving
force is to minimize the cost of both infrastructure and user
terminal as much as possible. One trade-off is to remove
unnecessary features and functionality: a kind of Reduced
Feature Set Cellular (RFSC) system, by analogy with RISC
designs. Another is to compromise on QoS metrics, such as
connectivity, blocking rate, bandwidth, delay, and jitter, as
long as they are still acceptable to customers’ specific
applications.
Hence, the design goal of BoP project is different from most
of current WLL technologies, whose preference in the first
place is to optimize performance rather than to dramatically
reduce cost. Figure 2 shows graphically how the BoP
technology will differ qualitatively from existing wireless
WCNC 2004 / IEEE Communications Society
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:03 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
access technologies in terms of major design criteria. The
explanations and motivations for the design space for BoP in
this graph are mostly clear from the preceding discussion.
S: Satellite
Voice Coverage
L S C: Cellular
C P P: Paging
S B L: Low-range
B cordless
C W: 80216a
W B: BoP
W L
P Cost
S W C L BP PB L CW S
B P
L B
W
L
C S
P C
S W
Mobility Capacity
Figure 2: Comparison of WLL technologies
The axis labeled “Voice” merits some further discussion. It
indicates the degree to which toll-quality voice
communications is supported by the system. While providing
only data service will certainly reduce cost, the requirements
of serving multi-lingual and low literacy customers motivate
us to investigate voice also. However, as we discussed later,
supporting the hard QoS constraints of real-time voice not
Our current design assumes that the BoP system will provide
voice messaging (as used successfully by Voxiva [14]) in most
cases, with real-time voice supported mainly for emergency or
urgent calls. Other technologies shown in Figure 2 are briefly
discussed below.
C. Technology alternatives
• Satellite-based system with VSATs (very small aperture
terminals) provides both telephony and data services for rural
communities and isolated areas such as islands. It has the
largest coverage area but it is also the most expensive solution
maintenance cost and power requirements. VSAT is
economical for large rural projects but uneconomic for small
projects involving a number of lines per system.
• Mobile cellular-based systems such as MiniGSM from
Ericsson offer medium coverage area, carrier-grade voice
services and limited data services. The installation cost of base
stations and terminals is much lower than that of satellite-
based systems but it is still formidable for rural BoP people. It
supports a large number of connections in dense urban areas
and seamless mobility, which, we considered relatively
unimportant functionalities for current BoP deployments.
• Paging networks such as Skytel have large coverage area
and they are very cost efficient as well. The paging networks
have many options for messaging including numeric,
alphanumeric, two-way, and message storage. However, they
suffer very low data rate services (1.2 kbps for narrowband
systems) and no voice services. So depending on targeted
areas, the paging network may or may not be a candidate for
BoP projects.
460 0-7803-8344-3/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
• Low-range cordless systems such as DECT (Digital
enhanced cordless telecommunications) provide low power,
small range, high subscriber density, limited data services, and
carrier-grade voice services. These systems are considered to
be a complement to the existing PSTN infrastructure. Because
of the limited coverage area, these systems only have low cost
in urban and suburban area where subscriber density is high.
For rural areas with sparse connections, the per-line cost is
relatively high because more base stations are needed to
provide enough coverage. CoreDECT, a variation of DECT, is
able to extend the coverage to 10 km and provides both data
services and carrier grade service voice services.
• WLAN systems such as 802.11 provide low-cost and high
speed data services. But it has very limited coverage so that it
is not suitable for rural deployments. WMAN systems such as
the 802.16 family will extend the potential of WLAN to far
longer distances [11]. Its initial version, aiming at provide a
wireless substitute to wired broadband access systems,
operates at 10-66 GHZ frequency band and has very short
coverage due to rain or foliage. But the recent 802.16a
extension uses a lower frequency band (2-11 GHz) and is able
to provide bandwidth as high as 70 Mbps and boost the
coverage to 50 km. But the system is quite expensive
(estimates are over $500K per base station) and the design
goal appears to be the support of multimedia rather than low
cost; volume shipments are not expected for at least one year.
As shown in the Figure 2, none of existing technologies is
designed according to the requirements of BoP. In the next
section we present initial link analysis to evaluate the merits of
BoP solutions based on WCDMA and OFDM.
III. WCDMA AND OFDM LINK BUDGET ANALYSIS
The link analysis is a balance sheet that outlines the detailed
apportionment of transmission and reception resources, noise,
link attenuation and system error performance. When
combined with channel propagation model, it is able to give
insight about whether the system could meet the BoP
requirement comfortably, marginally or not at all. It can help
us to make the basic assessment of system’s cost, performance
and tradeoffs among different components.
A. Wireless Channel Model
Coverage is fundamentally determined by wireless channel
characteristics. To characterize the radio channel, both signal
attenuation and time dispersion needs to be modeled.
Large-scale wireless propagation models, which predict the
mean signal strength for an arbitrary transmitter-receiver
separation distance, are useful in estimating the radio coverage
area of a transmitter. Small-scale propagation models, such as
Rayleigh model are useful in estimating multipath behavior
but do not affect the principal features of coverage.
The Okumura-Hata model [1, 2] is an empirical large-scale
propagation model that is wholly based on measured data. The
model has very high accuracy and takes into account carrier
frequency, antenna heights, and terrain profile. For rural area
targeted by our project, the model for packet loss (PL) is as
follows, where f c is carrier frequency (1950 MHz for
UMTS), hte and hre are the heights of antenna of base station
WCNC 2004 / IEEE Communications Society
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:03 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
(BS) and mobile terminal (MT), and d is the distance between
BS and MT.
PL ( d )( dB ) = 69.55 + 44.49 log f c − 13.82 log hte − a ( hre )
(1)
+ ( 44.9 − 6.55 log hte ) log d − 4.78(log f c ) 2 − 40.94 + X σ
Mobile antenna correction factor is given by
a ( hre ) = 3.2(log 11.75hre ) 2 − 4.97dB (2).
X σ denotes a zero mean lognormal random variable that
reflects the variation in average received power. Typical
outdoor standard deviation of X σ ranges from 6 to 8 dB.
Given the required probability of 95%, this leads to a 7 to 8
fading margin [4].
Time dispersion arises due to multipath propagation whereby
replicas of the transmitted signal reach the receiver with
different propagation delay. The rms delay spread, τ rms ,
which is the square root of the second central moment of the
power-delay profile, determines the performance of digital
receiver alone, independent of the power-delay profile shape,
given that τ rms is much shorter (10 times) than the symbol
period of the digital modulation [3]. In general,
τ rms = T1d ε y , (3)
where T1 is the median value of τ rms at d = 1 km, ε is an
exponent between 0.5 and 1, and y is a lognormal variable
with a zero mean and a standard deviation between 2 and 6
dB. For a rural area with flat terrain, T1 = 0.1µs and
ε = 0.5 . At the coverage radius of 50 km, equation (3) gives
a delay spread τ rms between 1.12 µs and 2.79 µs . If the
area has a mountainous profile, the delay spread can be much
larger, varying between 1 and 20 µs .
B. WCMDA Link Budget
WCDMA is a wideband Direct-Sequence Code Division
Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) system that is the most widely
adopted 3G air interface so far. WCDMA spreads the user
information bits over a wide bandwidth (3.84 Mcps) by
multiplying the user data with quasi-random bits derived from
CDMA spreading codes.
WCDMA System capacity may be either uplink or downlink
limited. A cell is uplink capacity limited when it reaches its
maximum permissible level of upload load (interference
margin). A cell is downlink capacity limited when it reaches
its maximum transmit power. Our scenario is an uplink
capacity-limited scenario where the network has been planned
with a relatively low uplink cell load for the benefit of a lower
interference margin [5].
Similar to [5], the link budget of Adaptive Multi-rate (AMR)
4.75 kbps voice service is calculated. The AMR codec is
capable of producing voice stream from 4.75 kbps to 12.2
kbps. To get the largest possible coverage, the lowest coding
rate is used.
Assume that base station antenna height is 30m, mobile
antenna height is 1.5 m, and carrier frequency is 1950 MHz;
for coverage radius of 50 km, equations (1) and (2) give a
461 0-7803-8344-3/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
required link margin of 162.6 dB. Compared with the is bit rate of the traffic. Hence, a 3dB interference margin is
supported propagation loss in Table 1, there is 162.6 – 134.9 = able to support 191 simultaneous users.
27.7 dB deficit. So the design problem is how to make up the If interference margin is limited to 1 dB, to give a 2 dB
27.7 dB coverage deficit in the most cost-effective way. enhancement, then the number of simultaneous users
Table 1: Link budget of WCDMA AMR 4.75kbps voice decreases to 80.1. According to traffic theory (Erlang B
formula) [2], the system can support 65 Erlangs of voice
Transmitter (mobile)
traffic when Grade of Service (GOS) is 1%. For maximum
Max. Transmitter Power 0.125 W = a
200 users, each user has a decent 0.325 Erlang capacity.
21 dBm
Mobile Antenna Gain [dBi] 0 b • Reduced fading margin. This calculation of link budget
Equivalent Isotropic Radiated 21 c=a+b is based on a single cell scenario, possibly happening during
Power (EIRP) [dBm] the initial deployment of the mobile network. In this case, the
Receiver (base station) requirement on fast fading margin (for fast power control) can
Thermal noise density -174.0 d be lessened to 2 dB not only because of the absence of inter-
(dBm/Hz) cell interference, but also because of the decreasing of intra-
Base station receiver noise (dB) 5.0 e cell users. On the other hand, if multiple neighboring cells are
Receiver noise density -169.0 f = d+e deployed in one area, the benefit of marco-diversity can be
(dBm/Hz) exploited. For edge receivers residing in the overlap area of
Receiver noise power (dBm) -103.2 g = f+10*log(3840000) two adjacent cells, soft handovers between two cells to receive
Interference Margin (dB) 3.0 h
better E b / N 0 can provide a 3 dB gain. At the same time, the
Total noise + interference (dB) -100.2 i = g+h
coverage probability related log-normal fading margin could
Processing Gain (dB) 29 j = 10 * log be lessened also. So in the worse case of the single cell
(3840/4.75) scenario, a 2 dB enhancement could possibly be granted.
Required Eb/N0 (dB) 5.0 k • Allow Performance degradation. After the steps above,
Receiver Sensitivity (dB) -124.2 l =k-j+i the deficit shrinks to 2.7 dB, overcoming which has to rely on
Base station antenna gain (dB) 18.0 m
reducing the “required E b / N 0 ”. (The 4.75 kbps is minimum
Cable loss in the base station 2.0 n speech coding rate for AMR codec deployed by UMTS so any
(dB) further decreasing of the bit rate requires a new codec). The
Fast fading margin (dB) 4.0 o Eb / N 0 requirements depend on the bit rate, service,
Log normal fading margin (dB) 7.3 p
In-home loss (dB) 15.0 q
multipath profile, mobile speed, receiver algorithms, and base
134.9 r = c-l+m-n-o-p-q
station antenna structure. For example, voice services have
Propagation Loss (dB)
much large E b / N 0 requirement than non-real time data
• Taller and external receiver antenna. By moving the
mobile station antenna to the outside, the 15.0 dB building services such as email and ftp (1 to 2 dB in most cases)
penetration loss is saved. If the mobile station antenna is because of the high delay sensitivity. To satisfy the link
extended to 5 m from 1.5 m, according to equation (2), this budget, E b / N 0 has to be decreased to about 2.3 dB. In
gives an additional 5 dB benefit. After 1dB cable loss at principle the resulting degradation in quality can be offset by
mobile terminal side is deducted, the total physical layer advanced receiver technologies at base stations such as
enhancement is 19 dB with additional investment. multiple antenna diversity (roughly 3 dB gain) and multiple-
• More power. Doubling the maximal transmission power branch RAKE receiver (roughly 1 dB gain) [5].
from 0.125 mW to 0.25 mW (the maximum allowed for There are several other trade-offs that can be utilized to reduce
WCDMA), an additional 3dB can be gained. costs.
• Reduce interference margin. CDMA is an interference- • Limit the number of simultaneous users. This can
limited system in the sense that each mobile host treats the decrease IM; e.g. if only one user is allowed to make an
signals from other mobile hosts as interference. So the higher (emergency) call, IM can be decreased to 0 and another 1 dB
the traffic load is, the higher the interference is. The gain can be achieved.
interference margin (IM) is defined as • Further increase maximal terminal power. Unlike
IM = − 10 * log(1 − ηUL ) , (4) mobile handset relying on battery power, for our scenario, a
where ηUL is the uplink loading factor. A 3 dB interference kiosk can transmit at higher power if it has access to reliable
power source.
margin implies 50% loading factor. ηUL is calculated in [5] as,
• Reduce data service rate. For data services the
E / N0 transmission rate can be reduced and higher-layer error-
η UL = b * N * v * (1 + i ) , (5)
W /R correction algorithms (such as FEC or ARQ) could be used to
where N is the number of simultaneous users, v is activity recover from errors.
factor (0.67 for voice), i is other-cell to own-cell interference From above discussion, it is clear that WCDMA can support
(0 for the single cell case), W is the WCDMA chip rate and R BoP with only small modifications. Furthermore, most of the

WCNC 2004 / IEEE Communications Society 462 0-7803-8344-3/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:03 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
modifications do not influence the configuration of base Interference Margin (dB) 0 h
stations and terminals so the additional cost is also small. Total noise + interference (dB) -116.3 i = g+h
B.1 Uplink capacity analysis.
Required Eb/N0 (dB) 2.0 k
The tradeoff between voice and data service can also be Receiver Sensitivity (dB) -114.3 l =k+i
investigated. Figure 3 shows the relationship between total
voice capacity and data capacity at different levels of Base station antenna gain (dB) 18.0 m
interference margin where the E b / N 0 of voice is 5 dB and Cable loss in the base station 2.0 n
(dB)
Eb / N 0 of data is 1.5 dB. We observe that additional Fast fading margin (dB) 6.0 o
investment in the system may be unavoidable as the number of Log normal fading margin 7.3 p
active users increases. However, it is possible that with (dB)
extensible design this investment can be made incrementally In-home loss (dB) 0 q
as usage increases. One possible scenario is to provide Propagation Loss (dB) 141 r = c-l+m-n-o-p-q
increasing availability of voice service as ARPU increases for
each kiosk. Compared with Table 1, in OFDMA scheme, the total
200
bandwidth of 6 MHz is divided into 2048 carriers, of which
190.1 1/32 is occupied by each sub-channel. So the corresponding
180
in-band noise per sub-channel, shown on line (g) in Table 2,
# of Voice User (4.75kbps / user)

160
decreases as well. The interference margin is zero because
140 each sub-channel is orthogonal so that there is no intra-cell
120 interference. The inter-cell interference is also minimized by
100 IM = 3.0 dB using Frequency Hopping Spreading Spectrum (FHSS) in then
80
80.1 adjacent channel and TDMA as multiplexing scheme in the
uplink [10]. The fast fading margin is 6 dB, which is larger
60
than CDMA case. This is because OFDM has a higher peak-
42
40 IM = 1.0 dB to-mean power ratio and requires a power transmitter with
20
IM = 0.5 dB
high linearity. Ref [12] shows that a 6 to 9 dB margin
0
299.5 571.9 1361.7 produces satisfactory results.
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600
As shown in Table 2, there is 162.6 – 141 = 21.6 dB deficit in
Total Data Rate (kbps)
the link budget to cover 50 km distance even after the
Figure 3: Total voice capacity vs. data rate with given IM requirements on power and E b / N 0 are relaxed in a manner
C. OFDM Link Budget similar to the WCDMA case. So additional methods have to
be taken to compensate for the 21.6 dB deficit.
The calculation of this section is based on the OFDMA
1) One method is to decrease the bandwidth of each sub-
scheme proposed in 802.16a standards [11]. Similar to the
channel. In the extreme, if each sub-channel only uses one
WCDMA case, the uplink is the bottleneck for both coverage
carrier, the increase from row (g) of table 2 will be
and capacity. OFDM divides the available spectrum into many
10*log(2048/32) = 18 dB. However, the side-effect of
narrowband orthogonal carriers, each one being modulated by
decreasing the number of sub-carriers contained in a sub-
a low rate data stream. The orthogonality of the carriers allows
channel is that the transmission suffers more from the
them to be spaced very close together. FEC is applied to the
frequency selective fading.
signal before transmission to overcome channel frequency
selective fading. Each carrier has a very long symbol time to 2) As suggested in [11], more power, 1W, could be used at
combat Multipath delay spread. the terminal side, which has EIRP of 30 dBm, a 6 dB
improvement compared with 24 dBm. And a more advanced
Table 2: Link budget of OFDM voice service
antenna could be used to increase the mobile antenna gain
Transmitter (mobile)
(dBi) to 18 dBi, which is much larger than the WCDMA case
Max. Transmitter Power 0.250 W = 24 a
where only 5 dB enhancement is required.
dBm
Mobile Antenna Gain [dBi] 0 b 3) The simple OFDM demodulation scheme using a
Equivalent Isotropic Radiated 24 c=a+b multiplier bank as a channel equalizer assumes that the
Power (EIRP) [dBm] individual carriers pass through a flat fading channel, which is
Receiver (base station) generally accepted when the symbol time Ts > 100τ rms . The
Thermal noise density -174.0 d
(dBm/Hz) Ts in 802.16a is about 298.66 µs . In our scenario, τ rms is
Base station receiver noise 5.0 e between 1.12 µs and 2.79 µs so the flat fading channel
(dB)
assumption is satisfied. However, if the delay spread extends
Receiver noise density -169.0 f = d+e
(dBm/Hz)
to 20 µs due to worse propagation condition, to avoid the
Receiver noise power (dBm) -116.3 g = f+10* inter-symbol interference (ISI), the Ts should be extended 10
log(6000000/32)

WCNC 2004 / IEEE Communications Society 463 0-7803-8344-3/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:03 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
times accordingly, which suggests the number of sub-carriers
be extended 10 times also. This dramatically increases the
complexity of the system.
4) It is shown in [10] that OFDM is able to achieve about 1
bit/Hz transmission frequency for suburban propagation
environments. So the total data rate is around 6 Mbps, much
larger than the WCDMA case. This translates into a user rate
from 2.9 kbps to 187.5 kbps depending on the bandwidth of
each sub-channel.
According to the above link analysis, OFDM is capable of
supporting BoP with appropriate modifications. Compared
with WCDMA, the modification of OFDM requires more
changes of hardware, such as higher terminal antenna gain and
smaller sub-carrier bandwidth. Hence, the incurred additional
cost might be higher.
IV. DISCUSSIONS
In this section we discuss some of the issues exposed by the
link budget analysis in the previous section.
• Voice vs. Data. Voice traffic has stringent QoS
requirements in terms of bandwidth, delay and jitter. So voice
requires both minimum bandwidth guarantees and enough
Eb / N 0 to keep BER below some threshold. On the other
hand, data traffic could have flexible rate and lower
Eb / N 0 given that the average transmission rate is larger than
the packet arrival rate. So to minimize the cost, BoP WLL
should decrease the voice traffic as much as possible and rely
on other mechanisms to achieve the same function as voice.
Currently we assume that only during an emergency scenario
is real-time voice supported with cooperation from the MAC
layer. This differentiates BoP from pager networks without
increasing physical layer requirements.
• MAC and link-layer design. Due to the cost-saving
philosophy and coverage-limited scenario, BoP’s PHY layer
has less link margin and therefore is error-prone. So the MAC
layer needs to have a robust error recovery technique to shield
errors from upper layers. Other advanced MAC and link-layer
schemes could also be used to deal with BoP WLL’s PHY
layer, such as interference-minimizing scheduling in
WCDMA, sub-carrier adaptive modulation in OFDM, and
power-intermittent protocols for dealing with unreliable power
supply.
• Mobile vs. Fixed. In general a mobile handset has 3dB
body loss, limited antenna height and gain, limited power
supply, and suffers more from fast fading. So the terminal in
BoP WLL is assumed fixed in most cases. The mobility
support in a given area around the fixed terminal can be
achieved through multi-hop architecture.
• CDMA and OFDM. Although both technologies are able
to support BoP WLL with appropriate modifications, they still
have their own pros and cons. CDMA is simple, robust, but
has less capacity than OFDM. OFDM has higher capacity but
is sensitive to frequency, time, and phase shifting. It requires a
linear power amplifier to avoid inter-carrier interference and a
long symbol time to avoid inter-symbol interference. So the
OFDM system tends to be more complex and costly than a
CDMA-based system.
WCNC 2004 / IEEE Communications Society
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:03 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
We discussed the motivation for providing communications
services to the Bottom of Pyramid. We summarized the major
requirements of designing new BoP WLL technology and
differentiated it from existing WLL alternatives in terms of
cost, coverage, capacity, power, mobility and voice support.
Finally we evaluate the feasibility of using CDMA and OFDM
in a BoP WLL system by calculating link budgets for their
corresponding representative system, namely, WCDMA and
802.16a. The main contributions of our work are as follows:
• We proposed a new design philosophy that focuses on
cost reduction instead of performance optimization based on
our target of sustainable and profitable BoP communication
systems.
• Our link budget analysis on WCDMA and OFDM
indicates that in general both technologies can be used for BoP
WLL with small modifications. However, the design
calculations and considerations indicate OFDM may allow
more capacity but be more expensive and complex than
WCDMA.
• Our link budget analysis points out how the tradeoff of
quality, data rate, support of voice, and power can be made to
avoid the investment in new hardware so that quality of the
application is acceptable and the cost is minimized.
• We proposed new research directions in the MAC and
link layer to cooperate with PHY layer to enhance the
performance of a BoP WLL system.
Due to the estimation nature of the link budget technique and
the significant question domain of optimizing the performance
of CDMA and OFDM, it is natural that our link budget
analysis is unable to consider all the tradeoffs involved.
Hence, numerous issues and open questions still exist.
REFERENCES
1. M. Hata, “Empirical formulae for propagation loss in land
mobile radio services,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Tech., 1980.
2. T. Sappaport, “Wireless communications: principles and
practice, ” Prentice Hall, 2002.
3. L. Greenstein, V. Erceg, Y. Yeh, and M. Clark, “A new path-
gain/delay-spread propagation model for digital cellular
channels,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Tech., Vol. 46, No. 2, May 1997.
4. J. Laiho, A. Wacker, and T. Novosad, “Radio network planning
and optimization for UMTS,” John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
5. H. Holma, and A. Toskala, “WCDMA for UMTS,” 2nd Edition,
John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
6. C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond, “Serving the World’s Poor,
Profitably”, Harvard Business Review, Sep. 2002.
7. www.grameen-info.org/grameen/gtelecom/
8. J. Howard, C. Simms, and E. Simanis, “What works: n-Logue’s
rural connectivity model,” World Resources Institute, July 2001.
9. Nokia White Paper, “The prerequisites for profitable entry
business,” 2003.
10. I. Koffman, and V. Roman, “Broadband wireless access
solutions based on OFDM access in IEEE 802.16,” Comm.
Mag., April 2002.
11. IEEE Std. 802.16a-2003, April 2003.
12. L. Hanzo, M. Munster, B. Choi, and T. Keller, “OFDM and
MC-CDMA for broadband multi-user communications,
WLANs, and broadcasting,” John Willy & Sons, 2003.
13. A. Applewhite, “IT takes a village,” IEEE Spectrum, September
2003.
14. Voxiva web page, www.voxiva.net, 2003.
464 0-7803-8344-3/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE