dailywireless.org » Intel’s Rural Connectivity Platform

Intel’s Rural Connectivity Platform

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T.S. Elliot

C/Net’s Charles Cooper spent Thursday hanging out at Intel Research Berkeley Lab where the company held an open house to showcase what it’s working on.

Berkeley is one of three “lablets” (research projects) that Intel operates in association with two other universities. One is in Seattle (collaborating with the University of Washington), and one is in Pittsburgh (collaborating with Carnegie-Mellon).

Cooper says Intel’s Rural Connectivity Platform is a low-cost way of providing roughly 10 megabits-per-second connectivity to remote areas. Without obstructions, Intel says the wireless long-distance nodes can connect every 60 miles.

The Rural Connectivity Platform (video) meshes point-to-point long-distance wireless links between villages, augmented with a number of broadband satellite connections.

Intel researchers are currently assessing the performance of point-to-point 802.11 and 802.16 (WiMax) long-distance links in a wireless testbed in and around Berkeley, California. They also have deployed several test links in India and more recently, in Ghana, where they have demonstrated a bandwidth of 5-7 Mbps over an extremely long distance: 10.5 kilometers. Researchers will continue testing and modifying the technology in additional deployments in India in 2006.

A key component of this solution is a variation on IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) technology. While the 802.11 Media Access Control (MAC) protocol was not designed for long-distance communications, researchers believe that modifying the MAC layer should resolve the problem, without the need for hardware or driver modifications.

The Berkeley lab will collaborate with other researchers from Intel, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, and UC Riverside as well as consultants from Thinkbank and ACME Laboratories.

In its simplest configuration, RCP has at least two end-point units that can be separated by line of sight (LOS) up to 100 kilometers (62 miles). RCP relay units can be used to extend the communications path across geographical barriers or to make “drops” to other communities between end-point units.

The hardware and software for the RCP end-point and relay units are designed to be reliable in highly challenging rural environments.

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: Steve Stroh explains that such 802.11 MAC changes are not new and such changes render the unit incompatible with “typical” 802.11 / Wi-Fi units.

The end-point and relay units utilize a single-board computer with an embedded 533 MHz Intel® IXP 425 network processor, Compact Flash Storage, 10/100 power-over- Ethernet (PoE) -capable Ethernet ports, long-haul radios (one to three depending on the configuration), and support for a Wi-Fi 802.11 access-point radio.

The long-haul radios, which are commercially available from many suppliers, can be selected to accommodate different frequencies. They can potentially be upgraded to support WiMAX technology. RCP also utilizes parabolic antennas radiating in 900-MHz, 2.4-GHz, or 5.8-GHz spectrums to address tradeoffs associated with licensing, distance, and interference.

Hey, how about a Vessel Monitoring System up and down the Columbia River (map) using a similar backbone. Sensors could feed it real-time data. The Maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) operates in the VHF frequency band and can be linked to a Vessel Traffic System (VTS).

Intel and U/W are working on a Mobile Sensing Platform that features a 400 MHz Xscale processor, 32 MB of memory and a base collection of sensors including a 3D Accelerometer, Microphone, Barometer, Humidity, Visible light, Infrared light, and Temperature.

Maybe the backend could be developed in collaboration with The Port of Singapore’s WiMAX system.

The Port of Wilmington utilizes four levels of security — Port Authority Security, the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USBP) and local agencies. Each agency plays a different role in keeping the ports secure. DHS is deploying 12 new camera systems, 71 thermal night vision devices and 187 new ground sensors as part of the Secure Border Initiative for the Northern border.

The 146 miles of the Columbia River from the Bonneville Dam to the Pacific Ocean, carries a low-level suite of toxics. But the monitoring sites to gauge toxics on the lower Columbia — and potentially divine their sources — have fallen from more than 350 in the early 1990s to just three, reports The Oregonian

John Delany’s Neptune Project (right) has been folded into the Ocean Observatories Initiative. OOI is the National Science Foundation’s contribution to a global system of ocean observatories called Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS).

The $130 million construction phase that will measure volcanoes, currents and other activity off the West Coast, using 850 miles of fiber and UAVs, starts this year.

The Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership is asking Congress for $3.2 million in next year’s federal budget to start toxics reduction programs and add 29 long-term toxics monitoring sites to test water, sediment, fish, mammals and birds. River advocates say that’s the minimum necessary to take the river’s pulse.

CORIE is a pilot environmental observation and forecasting system for the Columbia River that integrates a real-time sensor network and numerical models. Rutgers Long-term Ecosystem Observatory (LEO), on the East Coast, is developing a real-time capability for environmental assessment. Their Autonomous Underwater Vehicle fleet surfaces periodically to transmit hydrographic data back to mission control. It is a part of the expanding network of ocean observatories.

In other fish and wildlife news, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission completed annual work on the world’s largest long-term tagging project of a wild salmon stock. A total of 205,145 salmon were implanted with a laser-etched wire tag, 1.1 milimeters in length, between May 25th and June 4th, last year An ongoing Pacific Salmon Treaty coded wire tagging program has been conducted for the past 12 years during the first ten days of June. Salmon tags provide migration information.

Dan Reed (Reed’s blog), has joined Microsoft Research as its new director of scalable and multicore computing (Microsoft Press release). Reed served as director of NCSA at the University of Illinois and played a key role in the development of the NEESgrid (National Earthquake Engineering Simulation grid) project and the LEAD (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery) project.

Reed is the chief architect of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a national distributed computing system for researchers which enable shared data, computing and instrumentation on an international basis. TeraGrid provides global access to supercomputers and data bases.

Above, Sun shows off their Peta-scale blade architecture at SC07. A Sun-based Ranger Supercomputer, was dedicated in Feb. 2008, at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s the most powerful supercomputing system in the world for open science research, and is on the TeraGrid. Monterey Bay (MBARI) is developing remote access to lab equipments through the Grid, right.