A mong the broad set of top-down Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations established in 2000 (http://www.un. org/millenniumgoals), one stands out: "Make available the benefits of new technologies-especially information and communications technologies." Alongside good governance, technology is considered among the greatest enablers for improved quality of life. However, the majority of its benefits have been concentrated in industrialized nations and therefore limited to a fraction of the world's population. We believe that technology has a large role to play in developing regions, that "First World" technology to date has been a poor fit in these areas, and that there is thus a need for technology research for developing regions.Despite the relative infancy of technology studies in developing regions, anecdotal evidence suggests that access to technology has a beneficial economic impact. Cellular telephony is probably the most visible application, but there are many others, some of which we cover in this article.The World Bank's infoDev site catalogs hundreds of information and communications technologies (ICT) projects (http://www.infodev.org), albeit not all successful. Most of these projects use existing off-the-shelf technology designed for the industrialized world.Although it is clear that there are large differences in assumptions related to cost, power, and usage, there has been little work on how technology needs in developing regions differ from those of industrialized nations. We argue that Western market forces will continue to meet the needs of developing regions accidentally at best. ICT RESEARCH FOR UNDERSERVED REGIONSEvidence from the development of other technologies, such as water pumps and cooking stoves, demonstrates widespread impact from research.1, 2 Novel ICT has the potential for great impact in a variety of fields ranging from healthcare to education to economic efficiency. However, we do not propose that ICT offers a panacea for the complex problems facing nations on the path to economic development. On the contrary, at best, ICT can enable new solutions only when applied with a broad understanding and a multidisciplinary approach.I hope the industry will broaden its horizon and bring more of its remarkable dynamism and innovation to the developing world.
Ad hoc and sensor networks are an important, emerging niche that is poorly supported by existing operating systems. In this paper, we argue that network-wide energy management is a primary concern in ad hoc networks, and that this functionality is best provided by a systems layer. We are currently designing and implementing a distributed, power-aware, adaptive operating system, called MagnetOS, specifically targeting ad hoc and sensor networks. MagnetOS provides a single system image of a unified Java virtual machine across the nodes that comprise an ad hoc network. By automatically and transparently partitioning applications into components and dynamically placing these components on nodes within the ad hoc network, our system reduces energy consumption, avoids hotspots and increases system longevity. We show that a systems approach to automatic object placement in an ad hoc network can increase system longevity by a factor of four to five. * Supported in part by ONR Grant N00014-01-1-0968. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of these organizations or the U.S. Government. MotivationWith the recent proliferation of cheap and increasingly powerful mobile devices and sensors, ad hoc networking has emerged as a significant application domain. Ad hoc applications appear naturally in mobile environments and when fixed networking infrastructure is either unavailable or impractical. Examples of such ad hoc applications include large-scale environmental data-collection using sensor networks, coordinated battlefield or disasterrelief operations involving mobile computers, and ubiquitous computing in interactive, smart environments. Despite the importance of these emerging application domains, developing applications for ad hoc and sensor networks remains difficult and poorly supported by existing operating systems.Two inherent characteristics of the ad hoc computing environment make developing applications for ad hoc networks particularly difficult: ad hoc networks are limited in resources such as battery capacity, and they exhibit frequent and drastic variation in key system metrics, such as bandwidth and connectivity. Form factor limitations in miniaturized devices place tight constraints on the available energy per node [Hill et al. 00]. In addition, the network topology, available power and bandwidth can vary rapidly and through several orders of magnitude [Satyanarayanan 96]. Applications need to adapt, not only to external changes in the resource constrained, frequently varying ad hoc environment, but also to internal changes initiated by the applications themselves. For instance, a sensor application tracking an object that moves over time may need to relocate its event-filtering component closer to the object to reduce network communication. In addition, an application may change its behavior, as in the transition from defensive to offensive mode in a battle...
In this paper we present an analysis of HTTP traffic captured from Internet cafés and kiosks from two different developing countries -Cambodia and Ghana. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a analysis of the characteristics of the web trace, including the distribution and classification of the web objects requested by the users. We outline notable features of the data set which effect the performance of the web for users in developing regions. Using the trace data, we also perform several simulation analyses of cache performance, including both traditional caching and more novel off-line caching proposals. The second contribution is a set of suggestions on mechanisms to improve the user experience of the web in these regions. These mechanisms include both applications of well-known research techniques as well as offering some less well-studied suggestions based on intermittent connectivity.
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