Reliable internet access is a key enabler for economic growth. Although the Philippine government launched initiatives to improve connectivity, connection speeds remained below the global average, especially for mobile networks. This paper presents Hotspotter, a system that aims to aid implementers and stakeholders in quantifying and addressing network coverage issues. Hotspotter is an incentivized crowdsensing system that collects, maps, and visualizes WiFi and cellular data to pinpoint hotspots and dead zones for the effective deployment and relocation of WiFi access points. A mobile application for Android was developed to facilitate data collection on geolocation, nearby WiFi access points, and connected cellular networks. The user interface visualizes the aggregated data in a hexagon-grid map. Fieldwork was conducted in two sitios of Barangay San Lorenzo, Norzagaray, Bulacan to stress-test the Hotspotter system in a Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Area (GIDA). It was found that 2G and 4G had the widest coverage and strongest signals overall, with modal signal strengths of 4.0 and 3.0, respectively. Being at the cutting edge, 5G was not yet supported. In the end, the mobile application’s passive sensing, collecting, and caching of data successfully operated even in the most isolated areas without an internet connection.

What determines the success of community cellular networks? We leverage unique circumstances where all households in seven localities were interviewed before the launch of cellular networks. We observed substantial differences in network adoption across communities. Four communities displayed high and regular usage, while usage dissipated shortly after the network launch in three sites. Sixty-five percent of households made or received at least one call or text message. We find that a one standard deviation increase in household wealth is correlated with a three percentage point increase in network adoption and 43 additional cellular network transactions. Agricultural households were ten percentage points more likely to adopt the network than other households and female-headed households were five percentage points more likely to use the network at least once.

Repair and maintenance requirements limit the successful operation of rural infrastructure. Current best practices are centralized management, which requires travel from urban areas and is prohibitively expensive, or intensively training community members, which limits scaling. We explore an alternative model: crowdsourcing repair from the community. Leveraging a Community Cellular Network in the remote Philippines, we sent SMS to all active network subscribers (n = 63) requesting technical support. From the pool of physical respondents, we explored their ability to repair through mock failures and conducted semi-structured interviews about their experiences with repair. We learned that community members would be eager to practice repair if allowed, would network to recruit more expertise, and seemingly have the collective capacity to resolve some common failures. They are most successful when repairs map directly to their lived experiences. We suggest infrastructure design considerations that could make repairs more tractable and argue for an inclusive approach.

In the last decade, billions of people worldwide have upgraded from basic 2G feature phones to data-enabled 4G smartphones. In most cases, people upgrade in areas with 4G coverage (typically cities and large towns), but increasingly, people choose to upgrade in areas that only have 2G coverage or no cellular coverage at all. This counterintuitive behavior -- upgrading your phone despite living in an area that does not actively support many of the features of that new device -- is the focus of this work.

In disaster situations communication and power infrastructure could be damaged, disrupting their associated services. This could delay relief efforts and cost more lives. In situations where connections are damaged and unreliable, peer-to-peer (P2P) and delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technologies can help provide alternative communication modes particularly in support of rescue and relief operations. Combining the benefits of the store-and-forward capability of DTN and the data propagation techniques of Wi-Fi Direct, we have created a flexible framework called ARC which allows users to create applications that could meet their specific requirements, particularly those in support of emergency communications. To demonstrate our framework, we created a simple application using ARC, and used this application to evaluate its DTN and Wi-Fi Direct group recovery capabilities.

High quality video streaming for mobile users is difficult to achieve in some areas of the world due to poor broadband capacity and sparse network coverage. We propose a bandwidth-sharing scheme to allow users with limited uplink bandwidth to borrow idle bandwidth from nearby access points and provide these users the opportunity to experience higher quality video than what their own bandwidth could normally support. We developed a Linux kernel implementation of a multipath less-than-best-effort (MP-LBE) protocol for bandwidth scavenging and demonstrated, through testbed experiments, that video quality may be improved through bandwidth sharing. This may bring us closer to the ‘video everywhere’ vision even as incremental upgrades are made on broadband Internet infrastructure.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized, multi-hop wireless communication network formed by a set of mobile nodes without relying on an established infrastructure. Self-organized public key authentication in a MANET provides security in an otherwise hostile environment by requiring participating mobile nodes to cooperate in the establishment and continued organization of an ad hoc network. However, limitations of hardware resources such as processing power, battery, storage and bandwidth, tend to make the nodes selfish and uncooperative and thus can compromise the security infrastructure of the network. In this paper, we studied the effects of selfish nodes nodes in a MANET. Specifically, we utilized concepts of Value-Based Utility (VBU) and designed a Java module for WiFi networks for measuring selfishness and giving incentives to non-selfish nodes. In an incentive-based scheme, a node can only avail of other resources or services, if the node is deemed cooperative by the other node. Examples of resources or services in this context are: forwarding of certificates, answering certificate updates, and authenticating other nodes. This framework was modeled using a Java-based Scalable Wireless Ad hoc Network Simulator (SWANS). Our results indicate that the introduction of VBU enabled each node to track the behavior of other nodes and thus react appropriately to non-cooperating nodes.