Overview

This was a team project, with members studying different courses at Imperial, to come up with an engineering design to improve the lives of a target community in Peru.

Our team decided to come up with a way to improve the community's access to information and raise levels of digital literacy in the area. We narrowed down our implementation to installing a local server to act as a database of apps and other information. We eventually submitted our proposal detailing our design decisions, feasibility study and an overview of costs involved and timeline needed for installation.

Design

In coming up with a project proposal, we considered several ideas ranging from using smartphones to form a wireless mesh network to using power lines to transmit broadband data over long distances.

After performing a feasibility study of each idea we eventually decided on installing routers at key locations to form a mesh network, with a server that would serve information locally. The sever could also host offline apps that residents would find useful, such as messaging or speech translation. This would be supported by existing cellular internet to fetch information online.

I considered the use of mesh networks using openWRT, a linux distribution specialized to run on routers. These routers would be able to form mesh networks using the IEEE 802.11s protocol, connected to a local server that would host apps on docker instances.

The following video - narrated by all members in our team - gives a brief overview of our project. In this video I also perform a demonstration of one such app, rocket.chat, that is locally hosted on a server facilitating communication between a user on a PC and smartphone accessing the app.

Feedback

Our proposal was submitted to Engineers Without Borders (EWB) for this competition, which saw 10,000 students take part. Although our submission did not progress to the Grand Finals, we were informed our team was amongst the top 450 students in the UK and Ireland to have their project considered. We also received written feedback from multiple reviewers on our proposal, a few of which are referenced below.

EWB Reviewer Feedback:

A truly stunning submission, with very little room for error. As highlighted in my specific feedback points, this group have clearly tailored their submission to meet the design challenge, and appeal to the mark scheme. Kudos!

EWB Reviewer Feedback:

Overall, a very well-rounded project. The team has certainly ticked most of the boxes, clearly thinking about the community in all areas. They have provided a solution with a good life cycle and adoption process, which I am sure will improve the lives of those in the community. It was a pleasure to read!

EWB Reviewer Feedback:

Overall, the Community Wireless Mesh Network is a fantastic design concept and the use of available technologies tailored to the community needs makes it a simple solution. It is clear that you understood the social and economic struggles of the community well and designed your response accordingly. It would be good to see some collaboration with the community as part of the design process and stakeholder engagement and input is always key to a successful project and its implementation.