In partnership with Professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the Marconi Society hosted the second annual 6G Summit on Connecting the Unconnected in September, 2021. This three-part virtual series—which kicked off the Marconi Society’s inaugural public symposium, The Decade of Digital Inclusion—focused on the development of 6G technology as an opportunity to improve the affordability, accessibility, and usability of the network.

The 6G Summit brought together experts from technology and academia from around the world to discuss the existing technologies, policy challenges, and avenues for collaboration to expand digital inclusion. To incorporate ideas from students and early-career researchers, the Summit hosted a competition requiring participants to submit a short concept paper detailing their vision for how 6G technology can change the equation for the unconnected.

A team from the Communication Theory Lab at KAUST, won the Early-Career Researcher Competition with their paper, “Cactus Mesh: Rethinking Connectivity for Remote Areas.” We interviewed authors Aniq Ur Rahman, Fares Fourati, Malek Khammasi, and Maurilio Matracia about their winning paper and the role that digital inclusion plays in their approach to ICT.

Watch the winning team’s short video about their proposal to address the digital divide

1. Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?

We are a team of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) graduate students working at the Communication Theory Lab (CTL), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), under the supervision of Prof. Mohamed-Slim Alouini. We have a common background in Electrical Engineering, merging mathematics and statistics with signal processing and communication theory. Still, during our coursework and research experiences, we focused on different topics, namely, power systems, machine learning, spectrum sharing, and satellite communications.

2. What drew you to this competition?

As researchers in the field of communication technology, we focus on improving the quality of service of communication systems. Connecting the population that is not connected to the Internet is another dimension of enhancing the quality of service, which is often overlooked. As a step towards digital inclusion, we came up with a simple concept capable of connecting remote areas to the Internet. We found the 6G Summit Student and Early-Career Researchers Competition quite relevant to our concept. Moreover, the competition is an apt platform for showcasing our idea to the world, through the outreach of the Marconi Society.

3. Tell us about the problem your paper proposes to solve.

In remote areas with a sparse population, telecom operators usually avoid network deployment since the return on investment is relatively low. This leaves rural and hard-to-reach areas unconnected to the Internet. Our paper focuses on the urban-rural digital divide problem and sheds light on its most extreme cases. For this work, we draw inspiration from the Camel Library Project of Pakistan, which involves camels laden with books passing by remote villages regularly to supply books to students. The simplicity and the nobility of this initiative to promote education gave us the idea to develop a solution to connect remote regions to the Internet.

4. How do you think the development of 6G will impact digital inclusion?

Digital inclusion is one of the main focus areas in the 6G vision and it has recently become a crucial goal for policymakers and standardization bodies. With the advent of 6G, we believe that global connectivity will be finally seen as a basic human right and wholehearted efforts will be made to reduce the digital divide, through innovations in low-cost network solutions and government policies that incentivize practices for digital inclusion.

5. Why does digital inclusion matter to you?

Our group is culturally diverse as we come from both developing and developed countries where the digital divide manifests differently. Nevertheless, our contrasting experiences led us all to the common belief in the crucial role of digital equality in socio-economic growth. Digital inclusion matters to each of us because we believe in its ability to significantly boost education, economy, and healthcare and spread equality around the globe.

6. Why did you decide to study information and communications technology? How do you hope to impact the field?

Each of us have personal reasons for deciding to study information and communication technology (ICT). However, we all chose this field because it aligns with our backgrounds, current research interests, and career goals. This field is at the junction of our diverse backgrounds that include mathematics, statistics, signal processing, and systems engineering. Furthermore, it opens the door to various interesting research problems that heavily impact the world’s economic growth. Finally, the field of information and communication technology allows us to pursue our career goals, academic or industrial, by enriching the literature of digital inclusion and contributing to the design of cost-effective solutions that further promote digital equality.

7. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work?

Aniq & Fares: We have developed algorithms to deploy networks over a region based on the population that is scattered over it. We connected these nodes to the internet point-of-presence, and also suggested adoption of satellite backhaul nodes to minimize the overall cost.

Read more: A. U. Rahman et al. “Network Graph Generation through Adaptive Clustering and Infection Dynamics: A Step Towards Global Connectivity.” 2021. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.10690.

Maurilio: Related to the problem of bridging the digital divide, I have recently proposed the concept of wind-turbine-mounted base stations, which can help to cover large areas with high wind availability in a sustainable manner.

Read more: M. Matracia, M. A. Kishk, and M.-S. Alouini, ‘Exploiting Wind Turbine-Mounted Base Stations to Enhance Rural Connectivity’, 2021. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12877.

Malek: I’m motivated by the renewed attention towards satellite systems as a key technology for future communication generations. I have been working on precoding for high-throughput satellite communication systems. In our project, we survey the literature on precoding techniques for high-throughput satellite communication systems. Our work presents a comprehensive overview and a novel classification of the recent precoding techniques. It also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the different precoding categories and practical satellite communication systems impairments.