Master students from school of ICT are connecting Africa
At the 11th of January there was an exhibition at school of ICT held by the master students from the Communication Systems Design course. Two of the teams who have been working with projects to improve the abilities to connect Africa are the MINNE3 team who has been developing a green router and and the BURUCA team who has been designing sustainable networks in Tanzania and developed services for them.
Lean Open Source Router enables green ICT infrastructures for power scarce Africa
Fresh from the School of ICT, KTH comes a promising solution to Africa’s ICT infrastructure and connectivity needs: the MINNE3 router, which stretches the cost to performance ratio of routers to the extreme. This together with the router’s extremely low power consumption and a robust energy storage solution make it an ideal choice for quick and rugged deployments for rural Africa.
MINNE3’s routing performance has been tested and benchmarked at a packet forwarding speed of 780kpps, yielding a routing throughput of 3.6Gbps for average sized packets. Under full load the power consumption is as low as 25W, which is unparalleled in this class. The very low power consumption allows running the router completely off the power grid harnessing natural solar and wind power. MINNE3 has developed a novel ultra-capacitor based energy storage solution that, unlike traditional batteries, is immune to temperature condition and can be charged and discharged repeatedly. An intelligent power control unit helps to manage, balance, and report the energy and environmental data and provides a flexible, no-frills and reliable operation in remote conditions.
MINNE3 at heart uses an open source routing engine and operating system, a Linux distribution scaled down and optimized for production grade routing called Bifrost. The router supports SFP network interfaces with Digital Optical Monitoring for optical links. In all, MINNE3 is highly cost effective, delivering many times the value offered by competing big vendors at less than half the price.
MINNE3 is a tailored solution to the ICT problem of Africa, which is a challenge characterized by the dearth of power grids, harsh weather conditions, and lack of public-private willingness to invest. MINNE3 router has been increasingly recognized starting with the interest shown by the largest rural ISP of Tanzania that delivers the ICT services to hitherto unconnected rural villages and towns. Additionally, MINNE3 is deployed in a number of research and educational networks connecting African universities, and research centers.
Watch the project movie made by the MINNE3 team
Designing Sustainable Networks in Rural Africa
BURUCA (Building Rural Africa) is an exciting research and development project aimed at building sustainable networks in rural Africa. Modeled on a groundbreaking concept that rural areas can aspire to become self sustained when it comes to ICT, BURUCA's pilot will provide network connectivity for numerous villages located in the three districts of Bunda, Nata and Mugumu in Mara region, Tanzania.
Since BURUCA's inception, its outstanding work has been a product of a motto “everyone in the world should have accessibility to the network”. Today, BURUCA network can support up to 50,000 users in two districts. As part of the project, BURUCA developed services that run locally on the network. One of these essential services is an E-government online reporting system, which is currently being used for delivery and feedback to reports by government officials in the districts.
Furthermore, a video conferencing solution is currently being deployed between the Primary Health Center (PHC) in Nata and a Designated District Hospital (DDH) in Mugumu that will enable doctors to prescribe medicine to their patients while being off site.
Moreover, BURUCA's solution to tackle a known problem of energy especially in rural areas is being explored by this project as well. Wind and solar power data in the region is being collected live from the area to explore alternative energy solutions that will be implemented in a very near future.