TownshipNet: A localized hybrid TVWS-WiFi and cloud services network Senka Hadzic and Amreesh Phokeer ICT for Development Research Centre University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa {shadzic, aphokeer}@cs.uct.ac.za David Johnson Meraka Institute Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Cape Town, South Africa djohnson@csir.co.za Abstract—This paper describes a network architecture to provide low cost last mile access and cloud services for local content sharing in a poorly resourced township environment. We described how ICT solutions are developed in close partnership with the local community who will benefit from the interventions. We analyze the data usage patterns of townships mobile users, to provide us with a real understanding of the needs of the community. This data usage analysis is used to inform the design of the network and of the localized cloudlet services. The network consists of hybrid TV White Space and WiFi backhaul and WiFi public access points. Keywords— wireless backhaul, ICT4D, TVWS, local content generation, cloud. I. INTRODUCTION Townships (a term used for urban informal settlements in South Africa) typically have limited connectivity options (mostly 3G), however even those are often limited due to lack of affordability for the average user. Devices for accessing the Internet are often restricted to mobile phones, and increasingly exclusively smart phones. Much of the Internet traffic on these smart phones consists of application downloads or updates [1] as well as traffic between users in nearby proximity [2]. In general, social interactions are known to depend on geographic proximity, where friendship probability decays with distance [3]. This provides strong motivation for a new Internet architecture where local free/low-cost Public WiFi is provided for commonly accessed content and localized services are used for content sharing between users who are living in close proximity. Licence-free backhaul connectivity to connect Public WiFi access points in poorly connected areas has traditionally used 5 GHz WiFi. In our architecture we make use of a hybrid of TV White Space and 5 GHz WiFi for wireless backhaul. TV White Space makes use of unused TV channels in specific geographic locations to provide connectivity. In our system we make use of radios that down-convert WiFi into the UF band. The use of localized cloudlets – small datacenters found at the edge of the Internet [4] can improve network performance and provide processing and storage capability at the network edge and also provide redundancy should the Internet backhaul link fail. Distributed Cloud services have also been provided in rural areas in the VillageShare project [2] and provide localized content sharing. We make use of these concepts in our TownshipNet network architecture in this paper. Our trial site, where our TownshipNet architecture will be used is Masiphumelele, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, situated between Kommetjie, Capri Village and Noordhoek occupying roughly one square kilometer. We have selected this township due to the large number of NGOs working in health care, education and youth development and our hope is that TownshipNet will amplify the good work already happening in the township. We can divide our contribution in two parts: (1) Analyzing mobile phone usage patterns (2) providing low cost last mile access, and (3) providing a local cloud for collaboratively generated content. By exploring the mobile data usage patterns we will be able to understand their needs and provide an appropriate solution to the community. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: we describe the background and motivation in the next section, followed by a brief overview of related work in Section III. Our methodology and contributions are given in Section IV, and network architecture is illustrated in Section V. We present some of our preliminary results in Section VI. Finally, in Section VII we conclude the paper and describe our future work. II. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION Masiphumelele, initially known as Site 5 during Apartheid in the 1980s, is a Xhosa word meaning "We will succeed". In 2010, the population was estimated at 38000. A number of NGOs such as Living Hope, MasiCorp and Desmond TuTu foundation have been working for the past decade to uplift the community through health care, education, youth programs and business development initiatives and there are many opportunities to develop ICT solutions to compliment these services. The township currently has no public WiFi and the Cape Town's planned public WiFi project in the townships of Khayelitsha and Mitchell's Plain will not be implemented in Masiphumelele in the short term. Current Internet in Masiphumelele is limited to 3G from the biggest South African operators (Vodacom, MTN and Cell- C), an Internet Cafe and Internet access at the Library. We are 978-1-4673-6670-0/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE