Opportunistic data services in least developed countries

Abstract

According to many studies, IT should become a key facilitator in establishing primary education, reducing mortality or supporting commercial initiatives in Least Developed Countries. The main barrier to the development of IT services in these regions is not only the lack of communication facilities, but also the lack of consistent information systems, security procedures, economic and legal support, as well as political commitment. In this paper, we propose the vision of an infrastructure-less data platform well suited for the development of innovative IT services in Least Developed Countries. We propose a participatory approach, called Folk-IS, where each individual implements a small subset of a complete information system thanks to highly secure, portable and low-cost personal devices as well as opportunistic networking, without the need for any form of infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on the exploitation and feasibility analysis of the Folk-IS vision. We also review the technical challenges that are specific to this approach.

OPPay: Design and Implementation of a Payment System for Opportunistic Data Services

“…However, if too much fee is paid compared to the value of the transactions, the system would become economically infeasible. 1 To compute the transaction fee, one needs to multiply two parameters: i) fee rate and ii) transaction packet size.…”

“…3: i) P tx and Rtx spend the same output from Dtx; ii) Dtx has multiple inputs but only two outputs; iii) P tx has one input and one or two outputs; iv) only one input and one output are in Rtx. 1 Economic feasibility refers to the fact that the users should pay the majority of the money to the service providers, rather than to the miners. Based on these observations, the packet size of Dtx is largely decided by the number of inputs, since the number of outputs is always two while the number of inputs is largely random.…”

“…Opportunistic data services refer to the data management and networking tasks performed by the crowd opportunistically [1]. Such services are not managed and delivered in a centralized way, rather through participatory approaches with the aid of distributed mobile and wireless devices.…”

“…To provide data services, the mobile devices transmit data using short range wireless communication technologies [2], [3], [4] to other nearby devices. The idea of opportunistic data service was originally aimed at providing certain type of networking infrastructure in rural and least developed areas, where no communication facilities are built [1], [5]. However, with the current computing power of mobile devices and demand for content rich data sharing applications, opportunistic data services have become common in the urban areas as well.…”

“…3) Opportunistic networking [12], [13], [14], [15], which refers to data offloading and data forwarding by wireless devices. Developing opportunistic data services requires both opportunistic communication facilities and proper incentivisation mechanisms [1]. In the urban areas, personal wireless devices such as WiFi routers and smartphones are nowadays ubiquitous, which provide sufficient communication facilities to enable a variety of opportunistic data services and applications.…”