Network Graph Generation through Adaptive Clustering and Infection Dynamics: A Step Towards Global Connectivity
Journal article, 2022

More than 40% of the world’s population is not connected to the internet, majorly due to the lack of adequate infrastructure. Our work aims to bridge this digital divide by proposing solutions for network deployment in remote areas. Specifically, a number of access points (APs) are deployed as an interface between the users and backhaul nodes (BNs). The main challenges include designing the number and location of the APs, and connecting them to the BNs. In order to address these challenges, we first propose a metric called connectivity ratio to assess the quality of the deployment. Next, we propose an agile search algorithm to determine the number of APs that maximizes this metric and perform clustering to find the optimal locations of the APs. Furthermore, we propose a novel algorithm inspired by infection dynamics to connect all the deployed APs to the existing BNs economically. To support the existing terrestrial BNs, we investigate the deployment of non-terrestrial BNs, which further improves the network performance in terms of average hop count, traffic distribution, and backhaul length. Finally, we use real datasets from a remote village to test our solution.

Costs

Clustering algorithms

infection dynamics

k-means clustering

graph generation

global connectivity

network design

Statistics

Satellites

Measurement

machine learning

Pandemics

Heuristic algorithms

Author

Aniq Ur Rahman

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Fares Fourati

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Khac-Hoang Ngo

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Anish Jindal

University of Essex

Mohamed-Slim Alouini

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

IEEE Communications Letters

1089-7798 (ISSN) 15582558 (eISSN)

Vol. 26 4 783-787

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

DOI

10.1109/LCOMM.2022.3146606

More information

Latest update

3/7/2024 9