The Telkom Centre of Excellence at the Tshwane University of Technology`s French South African Technical Institute in Electronics (F`SATIE) has embarked on a research project to develop wireless systems aimed at improving telecommunications access to rural communities at an affordable cost.
The Centre of Excellence, which was officially inaugurated today, is a joint project of Telkom, Alcatel and Molopo Technologies. There are 16 Telkom Centres of Excellence at tertiary education institutions in South Africa providing post-graduate students opportunities to conduct research, which, previously, was only available at overseas universities.
"The programme is making a considerable contribution to keeping students at home," Marius Mostert: Executive in the office of the CTO of Telkom said. "In the past, students who did their post-graduate studies and research at overseas institutions were snapped up by companies in those countries after completing their studies. With the high level of research opportunities now offered at local universities, many post-graduate students stay in South Africa, thereby minimising our skills drain," he added.
The CoE programme is a joint partnership initiative of Telkom and industry who together fund the centres. Students are afforded the opportunity to perform research under the guidance of the academic staff at the various universities with practical input from Telkom and its industry partners. Students therefore gain tangible exposure to the real world of communication and, in turn, share their expertise with industry.
"This in turn results in a remarkable contribution to new development," said Mostert. "We in Telkom have already enjoyed the benefits of this interaction."
The research project at TUT is focused on the development of a multi-hop self-configuring wireless network with the objective of developing a communication network that can be deployed economically in rural areas where customers are spread far apart.
Traditional wireless local loop networks require extensive infrastructure and demand high investment; yet yield a very low return. Although ad hoc wireless networks are becoming commercially available, hardware and deployment costs remain serious issues.
The aim of the work carried out by the TUT CoE is to use existing WiFi technologies as the basis of a rural network. With the availability of low-cost firmware modifiable WiFi routers, it may be possible to build subscriber nodes for less than R1 500.
The CoE is developing a new protocol for extended range multi-hop communication. The requirement is for each subscriber node to be intelligent enough to enable it to receive and transmit signals in a mesh format thus serving the subscriber but also to relay signals to other nodes.
"We believe that this research is of major importance as it aims to solve some of South Africa`s rural communication challenges," Mostert said.
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