Low-cost communication for rural internet kiosks using mechanical backhaul

Rural kiosks in developing countries provide a variety of services such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, electricity bill collection, land records, email services, and consulting on medical and agricultural problems. Fundamental to a kiosk’s operation is its connection to the Internet. Network connectivity today is primarily provided by dialup telephone, although Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) or long-distance wireless links are also being deployed. These solutions tend to be both expensive and failure prone. Instead, we propose the use of buses and cars as ‘mechanical backhaul’ devices to carry data to and from a village and an internet gateway. Building on the pioneering lead of Daknet [15], and extending the Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group architecture [24], we describe a comprehensive solution, encompassing naming, addressing, forwarding, routing, identity management, application support, and security. We believe that this architecture not only mee...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Aaditeshwar Seth, D. Kroeker, Matei A. Zaharia, Shimin Guo, Srinivasan Keshav
• Keywords: Delay Tolerant Networking, Long-distance Wireless Links, MOBICOM 2006, Very Small Aperture