  More than 40% of the world's population is not connected to the internet,
majorly due to the lack of adequate infrastructure. Our work aims to bridge
this digital divide by proposing solutions for network deployment in remote
areas. Specifically, a number of access points (APs) are deployed as an
interface between the users and backhaul nodes (BNs). The main challenges
include designing the number and location of the APs, and connecting them to
the BNs. In order to address these challenges, we first propose a metric called
connectivity ratio to assess the quality of the deployment. Next, we propose an
agile search algorithm to determine the number of APs that maximizes this
metric and perform clustering to find the optimal locations of the APs.
Furthermore, we propose a novel algorithm inspired by infection dynamics to
connect all the deployed APs to the existing BNs economically. To support the
existing terrestrial BNs, we investigate the deployment of non-terrestrial BNs,
which further improves the network performance in terms of average hop count,
traffic distribution, and backhaul length. Finally, we use real datasets from a
remote village to test our solution.

Networking and Internet Architecture;Computational Geometry;Systems and Control;Systems and Control