  While the fifth-generation cellular (5G) is meant to deliver Gigabit peak
data speeds, low latency, and connect to billions of devices, and 6G is already
on the way, half of the world population living in rural areas are still facing
challenges connecting to the internet. Compared with urban areas, users in
rural areas are greatly impacted by low income, high cost of backhaul
connectivity, limited resources, extreme weather, and natural geographical
limitations. Hereby, how to connect the rural areas and what are the
difficulties of providing connectivity draw great attention. This article first
provides a brief discussion about existing technologies and strategies for
enhancing the network coverage in rural areas, their advantages, limitations,
and cost. Next, we mainly focus on the UAV-assisted network in resource-limited
regions. Considering the limitation of the on-board battery of UAVs and the
electricity supply scarcity in some rural regions, we investigate the
possibility and performance enhancement of the deployment of renewable energy
(RE) charging stations. We outline three practical scenarios, and use
simulation results to demonstrate that RE charging stations can be a possible
solution to address the limited on-board battery of UAVs in rural areas,
specially when they can harvest and store enough energy. Finally, future works
and challenges are discussed.
