Optimizing high latency links in the developing world

  • Authors:

  • Yaw Anokwa;Colin Dixon;Gaetano Borriello;Tapan Parikh

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM workshop on Wireless networks and systems for developing regions
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Long distance Wi-Fi links, satellite connections, and other low-bandwidth, high-latency, intermittent options are becoming the norm for providing connectivity in the developing world. For network administrators who must manage these connections, providing users the "best" (or even adequate) service is not a trivial problem. Previous work has focused on optimizing throughput and while we acknowledge the importance of this approach, we argue that latency is an important and often ignored component of network performance. The intrinsically high latencies seen in the developing world are exacerbated by excessive queueing from traffic which often swamp links with miss-sized queues. Current solutions to this problem tend to require resources (people, time and money) that are generally not available in developing environments. In this paper, we demonstrate that latency is a problem in real world deployments and propose an easy to deploy solution.