Delay-tolerant networks can complement cellular networks to address today's growth in demand for wireless data. We are interested in delay-tolerant networks for reaching out into underserved regions in growing economies, when distributing media and videos from cities to rural areas. To transport the data into these regions, public transportation vehicles equipped with wireless infostations are used instead of a traditional cellular infrastructure. We focus on media distribution in support of entrepreneurs that operate mobile cinemas in rural villages. Temporal metrics of a public transportation network are determined, together with the overall value of exploiting the mobility of participating vehicles. A dense transportation network of Zurich (Switzerland), which is known to operate reliably, is analyzed for the purpose of benchmarking. Nodes are assumed to be bus stations that are temporarily in contact with each other when a bus travels between them. Our analysis provides guidelines to design and build a hierarchical topological structure of similar networks. Figure 1: Media distribution with infostations: A mobile infostation is operated with the help of buses that travel to rural villages. There, the mobile cinema receive updates while in wireless range of mobile infostations.
Mobile technology is already playing an important role in the economic and social empowerment of rural communities in developing regions. However, rural areas often suffer from slow and unreliable network infrastructures. This limits access to content and services that may promote economic development. Focusing on under-served areas in rural developing regions, we aim to explore how ICT systems for collective intelligence can be used to foster economic and social empowerment of rural communities. In our model, microentrepreneurs equipped with low-complexity cinema-in-a-backpack systems can deliver educational and entertainment content in remote villages. The content is distributed to microentrepreneurs by means of opportunistic (delay-tolerant) networks. In such networks, mobile infostations mounted on public transportation vehicles deliver content without the support of telecom operators or any other dedicated network infrastructure. The delay tolerance of opportunistic networks makes them ideally suited to environments with under-developed ICT infrastructures. We discuss the technical challenges behind distributing digital content with a low-cost delivery mechanism and opportunistic networks. We also establish the case for DTN as a socially-grounded approach to mobile empowerment in the context of rural development. Toward this end, we present our work in an ongoing project that provides communities in rural South Africa with cinema experience by training microentrepreneurs in the operation of a DTN-enabled microfranchise.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.