In urban areas, the network operators deploy small-cell sites and install a large number of base stations to support densely populated cellular users. A similar small-cell deployment in rural areas is not feasible for the operators, as it will significantly increase the capital expenditure, and the return on the investment will also be comparatively lower. Hence, the most feasible way to provide cellular connectivity to rural areas is the deployment of large-cell sites. However, the technology

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... eveloped for International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-Advanced standard (or 4G) was evaluated for an inter-site distance of 1.732 km, making the large-cell connectivity required for rural areas an afterthought. For cellular last-mile rural connectivity to be a reality through IMT-2020 (or 5G), the key is to have future technologies supporting large cells. In large-cell sites, the users experience comparatively more path loss, and thus, have poor signal coverage. Further, compared to downlink, the transmission power in uplink is limited, and therefore, uplink transmissions define the coverage of the communication system. Motivated by this, we propose several coverage solutions for uplink, considering an extremely large-cell site scenario. We initially analyze the received signal-to-noise ratio with 4G/5G systems at various distances based on the link budget evaluation. At larger inter-site distances, we show that it is infeasible to achieve cellular coverage with the current 4G/5G specifications. We then propose enhancements related to the waveform, modulation and coding schemes, resource allocation, and power control mechanisms. We evaluate the proposed enhancements through system- and link-level simulations, and show a significant improvement in the coverage for cell-edge users. We also show that our proposed enhancements achieve close to two times the improvement in the network capacity when compared to the currently available 5G specifications.