Enhancement of Rural Connectivity by Recycling TV Towers with Massive MIMO Techniques

TL;DR

This paper explores using recycled TV towers equipped with massive MIMO technology to significantly expand rural connectivity coverage, demonstrating a cost-effective solution for bridging the digital divide.

Contribution

It introduces the novel idea of repurposing TV towers with massive MIMO for rural connectivity and provides a comparative analysis with legacy systems.

Findings

High tower MU mMIMO can cover 25 times larger area than legacy BS

Recycling TV towers is a low-cost method to improve rural coverage

Case study in Ethiopia shows many people can be served by existing towers

Abstract

Nowadays, the digital divide is one of the major issues facing the global community. Around 3 billion people worldwide are still not-connected or under-connected. In this article, we investigate the use of TV towers with multi user (MU) massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) techniques to offer connectivity in rural areas. Specifically, the coverage range is assessed for a MU mMIMO base station (BS) mounted on a high tower as a TV tower, and compared with a legacy mMIMO BS. The obtained results show that one high tower BS can cover an area at least 25 times larger than the area covered by a legacy BS. This is of high interest as recycling TV towers can enhance the rural connectivity with low expenditures. We apply the proposed solution to a realistic case study in an Ethiopian rural area, based on population densities and locations of current BS and TV towers. Our study shows that a high number of people can be covered by existing TV towers. Additional possible solutions to enhance rural connectivity are discussed in the last section.