About

Cellular networks in developing regions rely heavily on diesel for energy to provide network coverage due to the paucity of reliable grid power which directly impacts the economic viability of the network and long-term sustainability while also leaving a massive carbon footprint. In this paper, we propose the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of GreenLinks, an intermittency-aware green cellular network architecture that provides a virtual cell abstraction to extend cellular coverage to areas with unreliable power in a sustainable manner with minimal carbon footprint. GreenLinks relies on a combination of grid-solar powered software-defined cellular routers that can provide a wide range of services including calls, messaging services and mobile web using an intermittency-aware naming, addressing and routing layer that can provide high availability in the face of network failures and partitions. GreenLinks uses an energy-aware routing layer together with its energy monitoring module to perform advance detection and early repair of routes affected by power availability related failures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GreenLinks using a combination of a small real-world outdoor deployment, an indoor multi-radio deployment and larger-scale evaluation in an emulation environment. Using an economic framework coupled with operational data from a large cellular provider, we show that GreenLinks, in comparison to traditional cellular networks, can provide high reliability and availability while simultaneously providing a substantial reduction in economic costs.

Publications

WiRE: A New Rural Connectivity Paradigm [pdf]
Aditya Dhananjay, Matt Tierney, Jinyang Li, and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
ACM SIGCOMM, 2011. (demo paper) (Winner of Best Demo award)

SIMbaLink: Towards a Decentralized and Sustainable Solar-based Rural Electrification System [pdf]
Meredith Hasson, Nahanalei Schilling, Ariel Navarez, Sara Lee, Matt Tierney and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), 2010

Hermes: Data Transmission over Unknown Voice Channels [pdf]
Aditya Dhananjay, Ashlesh Sharma, Michael Paik, Jay Chen, Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy, Jinyang Li and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
ACM MOBICOM, 2010.

Practical, Decentralized Channel Assignment and Routing in Dual-radio Mesh Networks [pdf]
Aditya Dhananjay, Hui Zhang, Jinyang Li, and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
ACM SIGCOMM, 2009

People

Talal Ahmad
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

Fareeha Amjad
Center for Technology and Economic Development, NYUAD

Zohaib Jabbar
Center for Technology and Economic Development, NYUAD

Shankar Kalyanaraman
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
Center for Technology and Economic Development, NYUAD