LTE for rural applications and humanitarian relief

India faces a huge challenge in providing health services in rural areas. India, with only 8 skilled health workers per 10,000 people compared to the international norm of 25. needs to use wireless broadband technology along with cost-effective devices and cloud telemedicine apps, to extend healthcare to rural areas. The proper use of wireless broadband will ensure that advanced medical facilities, which are concentrated today in urban areas, is available to rural areas.

In addition to the rural health divide and lack of health care in remote area get more chronic especially during natural disaster. India has lost close to 35,000 lives in major quakes in last 20 years. Every year 30 million are affected by flood and another 50 million are affected by drought. Sadly, all these natural disaster seem to happen at regular intervals. The key effect of natural disasters as per WHO are deaths, severe injuries needing extensive treatment, damage to health facilities and water systems, spread of communicable disease etc. In this talk, we will explain how LTE and LTE-Advanced provide various new technological enhancements which help to address these ill effects caused by natural disaster.

LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies provide very high spectral efficiency and hence is well suited as a cost effective mechanism to deliver wireless connectivity to the end user. The ability of TDD mode operation of LTE technology to change the ratio of downlink to uplink data rate can come handy when disaster zones usually become content generator rather than content consumer. The support of MBSFN (Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network) can be used to provide proactive training on best practices to be followed before and after the disaster. This will help to reduce the level of mortality through direct effect of disaster during the disaster and indirect effect like communicable diseases which can happen after a disaster. M2M (machine to Machine) enhancements provided in LTE-Advanced can be used for centralized monitoring of logistic telemetry so that efficient delivery of food, water, tent, Blanket etc can occur after a disaster. SON (Self-Organizing Network) capability in LTE will allow the establishment of mobile base station at disaster zone without much technical expertise and can bring back connectivity in a short time in case of site damages caused by earthquakes, cyclone etc.