e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries

This paper presents a prototype design of antenna for Internet of Vehicle (IoV). Presented antennas is an array of 4 quarter-wavelength monopoles set in form of lozenge and on an infinite ground plan confused to vehicle’s roof. Monopoles are 2 by 2 linearly associated and are excited properly in magnitude and phase. Uzkov’s theory is first used to calculated appropriate excitation coefficients and after that Non-Foster circuit theory for determining an impedance-matched with a \( Z_{load} \). Ansys HFSS is used for simulations and results show a good bandwidth and particulary a superdirectivity in order of 8.2 dB reconfigurable in a desired and useful direction.

Irrespective of the maturity or infancy of e-learning adoption in a university, the academic staff always have varying levels of commitment to online courseware development and delivery. Some will be actively engaged, some will be passively involved while others will remain ignorant about online courses’ issues. This paper investigates trends in online courseware development in Uganda and classifies emerging participation levels into three, namely active, passive and exclusive engagement. The latter clustering followed a survey of 120 academic staff from six public universities in Uganda, with general findings indicating low participation of instructors in courseware development. For instance, whereas 60% of the respondents had been trained in the use of authoring tools, only about a half of them had continued to use these tools for courseware development. Essentially, the survey revealed that the variation in courseware development engagement is caused by both the individual and institutional strengths (active case) and weaknesses (passive and exclusive scenarios). As such, institutional support strategies for improvement in courseware development for each of these three categories are explored and discussed. Future researchers are encouraged to test the developed institutional support strategies in their e-learning or blended learning practice.

LoRa is designed for long-range communication where devices are directly connected to the gateway, which removes typically the need of constructing and maintaining a complex multi-hop network. Nonetheless, even with the advantage of penetration of walls, the range may not sometimes be sufficient. This article describes a 2-hop LoRa approach to reduce both packet losses and transmission cost. To that aim, we introduce a smart, transparent and battery-operated relay-device that can be added after a deployment campaign to seamlessly provide an extra hop between the remote devices and the gateway. Field tests were conducted to assess relays’ ability to automatically synchronize to the network without advertising their presence.

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) is a global controversial environmental challenge globally. Participatory approaches in planning and decision making have been advanced as part of the strategies in order to attain sustainable waste management systems. However, achieving meaningful public participation for such systems is still a challenge. The need therefore remains to explore different ways in which public participation in MSWM can be enhanced. The use of Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) has a potential to increase public participation in MSWM. However, its use still face hurdles from the social, institutional and political aspects that limit “public participation”. This paper reports on a study that explores the social, political and institutional challenges affecting public participation in MSWM problem in Uganda. An exploratory study was conducted in Uganda’s central region with key stakeholders in MSWM. The results were analyzed using thematic analysis based on the Enhanced Adaptive Structuration Theory (EAST-2) framework. The results show that knowledge and awareness, participant attitudes, institutional practices, political will and legislation are important for successful MSWM participatory planning process.

The Long Term Evolution - LTE - is one of the very last evolutions in mobile communication systems that offer a much wider bandwidth than its predecessors. That is why it is very much in demand for a massive deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) also called Machine to Machine communication or Machine Type Communication (MTC). With the IoT, the network is subject to recurrent congestion when densely charged which is due to increased uplink solicitation. MTC devices must complete the RACH process to access the network. Collisions occur during this process that leads to the congestion which, in turn, has a negative impact on the quality of service. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provided some solutions to alleviate the problem. In this paper we propose a congestion detection method since 3GPP only proposed contention resolution methods. We first determine the interval of use of preambles during which the success rate is the highest. By doing so, we determine the maximal preamble utilization threshold (Rlimit) beyond which quality of service is no more guaranteed. The novelty with this method is that once Rlimit threshold is reached, a contention resolution scheme could be activated and will remain so until the threshold drops below Rlimit. Our method can give better results if applied to contention resolution methods. Moreover it is simple, less complex and easy to implement in the LTE. Moreover, it does not require large investments.

The purpose of this article has been emphasized on the SIP Signaling Protocol in order to contribute to the improvement on sending and receiving message about the services provided by the VoIP servers. The current configuration of VoIP servers has allowed us to see that if a user connected by wifi to the VoIP server has disconnected involuntarily from the network without disconnecting his SIP client from the server, the server can not remove him from his base presence, where it stores all connected users, and cost the message that is sent to him is not stored and no longer he does not receive it.

To overcome this, we couple the Freeswitch intelligence used as a VoIP server coupled to a presence detection server and a MySQL database. This platform makes it possible to retrieve all messages with a non-connected recipient and store them in a database, then wait for their reconnection to send them the messages that concern them.

Nodding syndrome is an emerging disease which have unknown transmission patterns and no properly established mechanisms for diagnosis leading to numerous hypothetical postulations. It has affected thousands of children in Uganda with debilitating effect and serious economic consequences. Spatial-temporal analysis may provide a quick mechanism to establish comparative understanding of the various hypotheses ascribed to nodding syndrome and any other emerging diseases with similar clinical manifestation. There is considerable suspicion that “nodding syndrome is a form of epilepsy”, a hypothesis that has hardly been investigated in literature. The aim of the study described in this paper is to establish spatial-temporal relationships between ailments diagnosed as nodding syndrome and ailments diagnosed as epilepsy. An exploratory cross section survey in three districts of Northern Uganda was done. Spatial data of health centers were recorded and ArcGIS was used for display. The findings show significant spatial-temporal correlation of diagnosis reporting of nodding syndrome to epilepsy. The regression statistics overall, epilepsy significantly (p < 0.05) ex-plains about 58% of Nodding syndrome variability. The F-statistic shows a very highly significant value (p = 8.20481E-13; p < 0.05), meaning that the output of the regression is not by chance.

This paper proposes an optimised method to supervise free roaming calls. Since November 28th, 2016, West African countries and members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have decided to ban roaming charges among mobile phone users in these countries. Its implementation however poses a problem of performance costs of their visibility for certain actors such as regulatory authorities (R.A.). To improve this matter we proposed to set up a SIP proxy (Session Initiation Protocol) at the regulatory authorities in order to recover only the signaling of received calls in roaming. The SIP proxy is implemented by Kamailio. Compared to the literature, this article brings a new method of supervision by controlling and following the evolution of calls received in roaming. The results obtained have produced positive effects as only concerned calls will be supervised through the proxy. The proposed solution will facilitate regulators to perform their duties as taxing operators and resolving conflicts between them. It will allow end-users to have visibility into their calls.

Several approaches have been proposed to make practical work available in e-learning trainings. The visits of field represent an indispensable complement to the theoretical course given to students in the natural sciences and life sciences. Biodiversity areas may be politically unstable and potentially dangerous for non-residents. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the improvement of distance education in agricultural sectors by providing a collaborative platform for virtual field visits and even sharing resources.

To do this, we combine the intelligence of the Web of Things (WoT) with the power of WebRTC. Our contribution applies first to distance education in agriculture. However, our experimental results may be relevant for other STEM disciplines.

This platform, based on the WebRTC Kurento multimedia server and the Web of Things (WoT), allows the teacher and a group of students to go to the field to carry out practical work. The results of this outing are broadcast in real time for other students who are not on site.

Temporal networks can be used to model systems that evolve over longer time scales such as networks of disease spread, for instance, HIV/AIDS disease that is propagated within the population over a relatively long period. Analyzing temporal networks can be done by considering the network either as a series of snapshots (aggregation over a time window) or as a dynamic object whose structure changes over time. The first approach is used in this paper and requires specifying a size of time window that delimits snapshot size. To our best knowledge, there is not yet studies on setting the size of the window in a methodical basis. In real, existing works rely on a static or a regular value of time window size to capture snapshots over time.

This work is conducted to identify dynamically snapshots over time in a directed and weighted network. That is, we aim to find out the right time to start and to end capturing a new snapshot. To this end, we define a quality function to evaluate the network state at anytime. Then, we rely on time series to predict the quality scores of the network over time. A significant changes of the network state is interpreted as the start and/or end of a snapshot. Our solution is implemented with R and we use a real dataset based on geographical proximity of individuals to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

This position paper presents the design and outline of the implementation of a mobile money scheme that adapts to the realities of Internet-underserved Areas while exploiting the benefits of Internet protocols. In particular, we implement security and transparency in mobile money transactions using a lightweight permissioned Blockchain infrastructure. Nevertheless, due to network latency and potential connectivity issues, the design of the platform accepts semi-offline transactions: it leverages USSD, a 2nd Generation mobile protocol, only as a back-up channel to force writing of offline transactions to the permissioned ledger and ensure smooth synchronization of the blockchain.

Although a considerable investment in broadband infrastructure has improved broadband speeds across many African countries, the reliability and performance that users ultimately receive is determined also by the interconnection between networks and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and by where the content, services and applications are hosted. Often, high latencies to remote destinations introduce significant performance bottlenecks, suggesting that, in addition to investments in higher throughput links, effort should be devoted to improving interconnection between ISPs and locating content closer to the users. By untangling the complexity of content access, use, hosting and distribution in Africa, this study offers three main contributions. First, it discusses challenges related to usage, hosting, distribution of local content and services in Africa, by developing a case on African local news websites. Second, it makes publicly available measurement data and indicators for local content use, hosting, and distribution across all African countries. And third, it provides points of policy recommendations on how to improve internet access and use, and infrastructure performance from a content perspective.

In Uganda, patients receive care from different health facilities. However, most facilities struggle to exchange patient information across boundaries because their health information systems (HIS) operate in silos. Yet to meet the needs of a patient who receives care from different health facilities the participating facilities ought to collaborate, share and exchange patient information in order to enhance patient care coordination and continuity (PCCC) across the continuum of care. Using qualitative interviews we examine five HIS to investigate the problematic issues that could be raised during HIS active involvement in PCCC across the continuum of care. Results highly indicate that the existing HIS in the country do not enhance PCCC, and below are some of the challenges realized: interoperability objective not given priority during system design, HIS operating in silos, lack of a national standard for the patient record, health facilities exercising ownership of the data and other non-technical challenges. The main implication of these findings is that focusing on the interoperability objective as a design requirement during HIS implementation would potentially repress all other challenges and revive the active role of HIS involvement in PCCC.

Cloud computing allows individuals and organizations to lease storage and computation resources remotely and as needed. For such remote access to work efficiently, there is need for reliable and low-delay delivery of Internet traffic. By carrying out month-long Internet measurement campaign, this paper investigates location and latencies of cloud-based web hosting in the public sector of five African countries. Results of the study show that a large percentage of public sector websites are hosted in cloud-based infrastructure physically located in America and Europe. Analysis of latencies shows significant differences between local and remote hosted websites, and that delays are significantly lower for countries that host CDN nodes. The results also indicate high delays for local websites that are accessed circuitously.

In this paper, we highlight the impact of the routing load on the performance of ad hoc wireless networks. Specifically, we analyze Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) routing load and the impact of zone radius value on this protocol performance. First, we show that performance parameters curves such as routing overhead, Packet Delivery Ratio and End-to-End Delay don’t evaluate monotonously according to zone radius value. In our test context, we note optimal values for routing overhead and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) when R = 3. For delay, minimal values are observed when R = 1 and R = 4. Second, we study this hybrid protocol routing overhead according to network density and compare it to pure on-demand and table-driven routing approaches. Contrary to that is largely presented, in realistic wave propagation model context, taking into account obstacles and their effects such as multi-path one, proactive routing approach performs better than reactive one. In fact, in lossy link context, route request and route error packets broadcasted are significant. In dense network, ZRP, due to its multitude control packets, performs the worst for routing overhead and packet delivery ratio (PDR) parameters.

Diagnosis of heart disease rests essentially on the analysis of the statistical, morphological, temporal, or frequency properties of ECG. Data analytical techniques are often needed for the identification, the extraction of relevant information, the discovery of meaningful patterns and new threads of knowledge from biomedical data. However for cardio-vascular diseases, despite the rapid increase in the collection of methods proposed, research communities still have difficulties in delivering applications for clinical practice. In this paper we propose hybrid model to advance the understanding of arrhythmias from electrocardiograms patterns. Adaptive analysis based on empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is first carried out to perform signal denoising and the detection of main events presented in the electrocardiograms (Ecg). Then, binary classification is performed using Neural Network model. However in this work, the Ecg R-peak detection method, the classification algorithm are improved and the chart flow include a predictive step. Indeed, the classification outputs are used to perform prediction of cardiac rhythm pattern. The proposed model is illustrated using the MIT-BIH database, compared to other methods and discussed. The obtained results are very promising.

Cyber-healthcare can be described to be virtual medicine applied in reality. It involves the use of healthcare professionals consulting and treating patients via the internet and other modern communication platforms and using different techniques and devices of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to automate manual processes. This paper aims to revisit cyber-healthcare and its applications in the health sector in the developing countries with the expectation of (i) assessing the field-readiness of emerging bio-sensor devices through a cross-sectional pilot study that benchmark the arduino sensors against manually captured vital signs using calibrated devices and (ii) comparing unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques when used in Triage systems to prioritise patients.

The emergence of cloud computing has reduced the cost of deployment and storage dramatically, but only if data can be distributed across multiple servers easily without disruption. In a complex SQL database, this is difficult because many queries require multiple large tables to be joined together to provide a response. Executing distributed joins is a very complex problem in SQL databases. In addition, previous studies have shown that NoSQL databases performance better than SQL databases especially in the cloud computing environment where there is occurrence of huge volume of data. In this paper, we presents a novel data model for cloud services brokerage that supports the allocation, control and management of virtual system based on brokering function between cloud service providers (CSPs) and cloud users by integrating and man- aging cloud resources in a heterogeneous cloud environment. The model is implemented on a private lightweight cloud network using a graph and document-oriented databases. The experimental results show that a graph model has better performance than a document-oriented model in terms of queries execution time.

At a time when the opportunistic access to white spaces is a big opportunity for boosting innovation in broadband Internet services, many countries of the developing world are still lagging behind. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, the TV White Space concept has not yet been tabulated in the operational plan of the national regulator, thus leaving a void in terms of white space discovery and usage. While many studies are still conducted to discover white spaces in several countries of the developing world, most developed countries such as the UK and USA have moved beyond the stage of testing and experimentation to embark on real white space deployments. This paper revisits the issue of spectrum sensing to identify white spaces in the UHF analog broadcast spectrum band ranging from 470 MHz to 862 MHz in the DRC. The experimental results collected from the cities of Lubumbashi and Kinshasa reveal significant white spaces in the frequency band. They provide a proof-of-concept that the national regulator could use as a starting point towards the migration to the digital terrestrial television. The experimental framework can also be used by different telecommunication operators and researchers as a guideline for white spaces identification.

Wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) can collect not only scalar sensor data, but also multi-dimensional sensor data. It is regarded as the foundation of IoT (Internet of Things). A lot of Quality of Service (QoS) indicators (e.g. energy-efficiency, real-time, reliability and so on) are used to evaluate data collection. This paper presents different QoS strategies for WMSNs in the Context of IoT from the network layer, transport layer and cross-layer. As for QoS Strategies at the network layer, many routing protocols are introduced, and their characteristics are compared. This paper also discusses congestion control protocols, error recovery protocols and priority-based protocols at transport layer. Cross-layer QoS strategies play an important role for system optimization. Three cross-layer strategies are discussed. For each layer’s strategies, the challenges and opportunities are compared. Finally, the potential future directions of QoS strategies are discussed for research and application.

Over the years the quality of health service delivery has drastically improved through deliberate efforts that have been made to implement e-health systems in developing economies. In Uganda particularly, e-health systems have been introduced and implemented in both government and private-owned healthcare units. However, due to lack of a structured mechanism to guide the development of usable e-health systems there have been growing concerns related to usability challenges with the e-health systems. The challenges that include complexity of system user interfaces, limited interactivity of e-health systems, security and confidentiality concerns are attributed to ad-hoc design of system interfaces, limited involvement of users in the design process and misalignment of e-health interventions with user needs. In this research we examine the challenges of usability of e-health systems in Uganda. The research process was guided by the design science methodology that is premised on systems analysis, surveys and interactions with medical personnel and IT practitioners working with the health sector in the country. The overall goal was to identify the niches for the development of a user-centered approach to guide the development of e-health systems for enhanced and sustainable health services delivery in Uganda. The developed user-centered approach was evaluated by experts to ensure that it was fit for the development of usable e-health systems in Uganda.

Involving the citizens in their community dynamics and giving them an active role in tackling their main needs and reaching their expectations can be a successful recipe for a well-functioning society. In developing countries, this community strategy is even more important since these societies suffer from a lack of means that may compromise the effectiveness of their public services. Intended also to encourage the access to digital solutions and therefore to digital inclusion, our Community Tools solution proposes two participatory and collaborative governance digital applications: IZIDoc, a solution that allows the user to request official documents to the related administrative institution; and OurMoz, an application that enables the citizen to report community occurrences, concerning the public services. Both applications have been co-created, designed, tested and validated with the help of target users to facilitate adoption of the proposed solutions in Mozambique.

One of the main reasons for the still observed digital divide is the lack of communication infrastructure in regions away from urban centres. As these regions are normally spread over long distances and have small populations (i.e., prospective users), operators see little business opportunities and refrain from large investments to reach these areas. Upon this scenario, our Communication Infrastructure for Development (Comm4Dev) solution was built to offer a low-cost backhaul infrastructure, providing these underserved communities with broadband access. As to allow a wider range of application scenarios (e.g., precision agriculture, industrial production support), our Comm4Dev solution has been updated not only to further promote digital inclusion, but also to allow the development of communities that are in remote areas. To illustrate the potential of our Comm4Dev solution, we validated it in an indoor hydroponic farming testbed.

Learning games are widely used as teaching resources, because of their capacity to help learners’ increase their knowledge in conditions of autonomous learning, especially in domains for which training is expensive. However, to get the best productivity of these learning games, they should be adapted to the learners’ profile. To propose content in an application that satisfies the uniqueness of each learner is difficult. We therefore want to provide learners with learning games that meet their profiles and improve the proposal by tacking their new skills into account, so that they are always in the presence of games adapted to their needs. The idea of this paper is to propose a model, that provides a training plan based on learning games, adapted to the learners’ profile. The ALGP (Adaptive Learning Games Provider) model defines the learning profiles of individuals, then characterizes learning games to make a mapping between the profiles and characteristics of the games. But, to meet the needs of learners throughout the lessons, monitoring data are added, to dynamically adapt the content according to their progress. An evaluation of the model through learner follow-up in two separate classes, a first class assisted by the ALGP model and a second class with the traditional system without assistance of the model were carried out, and the results obtained show that the learners in the assisted class, are more motivated and more involved than in the non-assisted class, which increases their productivity.

In this study, we present an original method that enhance geocoding system in poorly mapped areas thanks to multi-agent system. In contrast with industrialized countries, many developing countries lack formal postal address systems assignments and usage, making the operation of translating text-based addresses to absolute spatial coordinates, known as geocoding, a big challenge. We recreated a standard of address as it is perceived and used by local people, a kind of non-official national address standard since there is no official one in these areas. Then, we designed a multi agent system in which agents are assigned different tasks of geocoding process and can perform negotiation to achieve global objective: find the best possible match or approximation of a location based on current knowledge. A verification of the usefulness of the proposed approach is made in comparison with Google geocoding API which shows that the proposed approach has great potential to geocode addresses considering local context semantic issues.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) have become a common feature in contemporary higher education institutions globally. In recent years, LMS have been adopted in some higher education institutions in sub-Saharan Africa including Tanzania, however, there are limited research in this area, which could hinder future developments. Therefore, this study investigates the adoption and usage of LMS as pedagogical tool among students and instructors at the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA). The methodology used in this study included the review of the literature, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. The study was conducted in Zanzibar from March 2016 to March 2017. A total of 431 students and 10 instructors participated in this study. The participants were selected based on the courses that have been involved in the pilot study. Microsoft Excel was used to present the findings in figures and tables. The findings reveal that 70% of instructors and 44.4% of students showed preferences to LMS system as a tools to be used in teaching and learning and 26.1% of students were neither agree nor disagree. However, there are various challenges influencing the level of use of LMS including, internet connections, access to computers, unfamiliar with Moodle and integration of LMS with others university systems. Overall, the study provided an insight into the environment surrounding the early adoption phases of LMS in SUZA, which offers a better understanding of the phenomenon. Subsequently, this will help enhance the adoption process in current contexts and assist in future utilization of LMS systems.

With the exponential evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring network security has become a big challenge for network administrators. Network security is based on multiple independent devices such as firewall, IDS/IPS, NAC where the main role is to monitor the information exchanged between the inside and outside perimeters of the enterprises networks. However, the administration of these network devices can be complex and tedious if it is performed independently on each of them. In recent years, with the introduction of the Software Defined Networking concept (SDN) offers many opportunities by providing a centralized and programmable administration. In this article, we propose a distributed SDN architecture for IoT with a coupled controllers/IDS, by using APIs to dynamically analyze, detect and delete malicious flows. The management of network security is therefore simplified, dynamic and scalable with this approach. We also present the deployment of a real network to test our solution.